Feynman Lectures On Physics

Feynman's Preface
These are the lectures in physics that I gave last year and the year before to the
freshman and sophomore classes at Caltech. The lectures are, of course, not
verbatim—they have been edited, sometimes extensively and sometimes less so.
The lectures form only part of the complete course. The whole group of 180
students gathered in a big lecture room twice a week to hear these lectures and
then they broke up into small groups of 15 to 20 students in recitation sections
under the guidance of a teaching assistant. In addition, there was a laboratory
session once a week.
The special problem we tried to get at with these lectures was to maintain the
interest of the very enthusiastic and rather smart students coming out of the high
schools and into Caltech. They have heard a lot about how interesting and exciting physics is—the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and other modern
ideas. By the end of two years of our previous course, many would be very discouraged because there were really very few grand, new, modern ideas presented
to them. They were made to study inclined planes, electrostatics, and so forth,
and after two years it was quite stultifying. The problem was whether or not we
could make a course which would save the more advanced and excited student by
maintaining his enthusiasm.
The lectures here are not in any way meant to be a survey course, but are very
serious. I thought to address them to the most intelligent in the class and to make
sure, if possible, that even the most intelligent student was unable to completely
encompass everything that was in the lectures—by putting in suggestions of applications of the ideas and concepts in various directions outside the main line of
attack. For this reason, though, I tried very hard to make all the statements as
accurate as possible, to point out in every case where the equations and ideas fitted
into the body of physics, and how—when they learned more—things would be
modified. I also felt that for such students it is important to indicate what it is
that they should—if they are sufficiently clever—be able to understand by deduction from what has been said before, and what is being put in as something new.
When new ideas came in, I would try either to deduce them if they were deducible,
or to explain that it was a new idea which hadn't any basis in terms of things they
had already learned and which was not supposed to be provable—but was just
added in.
At the start of these lectures, I assumed that the students knew something when
they came out of high school—such things as geometrical optics, simple chemistry
ideas, and so on. I also didn't see that there was any reason to make the lectures
3
in a definite order, in the sense that I would not be allowed to mention something
until I was ready to discuss it in detail. There was a great deal of mention of things
to come, without complete discussions. These more complete discussions would
come later when the preparation became more advanced. Examples are the discussions of inductance, and of energy levels, which are at first brought in in a
very qualitative way and are later developed more completely.
At the same time that I was aiming at the more active student, I also wanted
to take care of the fellow for whom the extra fireworks and side applications are
merely disquieting and who cannot be expected to learn most of the material in
the lecture at all. For such students I wanted there to be at least a central core or
backbone of material which he could get. Even if he didn't understand everything
in a lecture, I hoped he wouldn't get nervous. I didn't expect him to understand
everything, but only the central and most direct features. It takes, of course, a
certain intelligence on his part to see which are the central theorems and central
ideas, and which are the more advanced side issues and applications which he may
understand only in later years.
In giving these lectures there was one serious difficulty: in the way the course
was given, there wasn't any feedback from the students to the lecturer to indicate
how well the lectures were going over. This is indeed a very serious difficulty,
and I don't know how good the lectures really are. The whole thing was essentially
an experiment. And if I did it again I wouldn't do it the same way—I hope I
don't have to do it again! I think, though, that things worked out—so far as the
physics is concerned—quite satisfactorily in the first year.
In the second year I was not so satisfied. In the first part of the course, dealing
with electricity and magnetism, I couldn't think of any really unique or different
way of doing it—of any way that would be particularly more exciting than the
usual way of presenting it. So I don't think I did very much in the lectures on
electricity and magnetism. At the end of the second year I had originally intended
to go on, after the electricity and magnetism, by giving some more lectures on the
properties of materials, but mainly to take up things like fundamental modes,
solutions of the diffusion equation, vibrating systems, orthogonal functions,...
developing the first stages of what are usually called "the mathematical methods of
physics." In retrospect, I think that if I were doing it again I would go back to
that original idea. But since it was not planned that I would be giving these lectures again, it was suggested that it might be a good idea to try to give an introduction to the quantum mechanics—what you will find in Volume III.
It is perfectly clear that students who will major in physics can wait until their
third year for quantum mechanics. On the other hand, the argument was made
that many of the students in our course study physics as a background for their
primary interest in other fields. And the usual way of dealing with quantum
mechanics makes that subject almost unavailable for the great majority of students
because they have to take so long to learn it. Yet, in its real applications—especially in its more complex applications, such as in electrical engineering and chemistry—the full machinery of the differential equation approach is not actually
used. So I tried to describe the principles of quantum mechanics in a way which
wouldn't require that one first know the mathematics of partial differential equations. Even for a physicist I think that is an interesting thing to try to do—to
present quantum mechanics in this reverse fashion—for several reasons which
may be apparent in the lectures themselves. However, I think that the experiment
in the quantum mechanics part was not completely successful—in large part
because I really did not have enough time at the end (I should, for instance, have
had three or four more lectures in order to deal more completely with such matters
as energy bands and the spatial dependence of amplitudes). Also, I had never
presented the subject this way before, so the lack of feedback was particularly
serious. I now believe the quantum mechanics should be given at a later time.
Maybe I'll have a chance to do it again someday. Then I'll do it right.
The reason there are no lectures on how to solve problems is because there were
recitation sections. Although I did put in three lectures in the first year on how to
solve problems, they are not included here. Also there was a lecture on inertial
4
guidance which certainly belongs after the lecture on rotating systems, but which
was, unfortunately, omitted. The fifth and sixth lectures are actually due to
Matthew Sands, as I was out of town.
The question, of course, is how well this experiment has succeeded. My own
point of view—which, however, does not seem to be shared by most of the people
who worked with the students—is pessimistic. I don't think I did very well by the
students. When I look at the way the majority of the students handled the problems
on the examinations, I think that the system is a failure. Of course, my friends
point out to me that there were one or two dozen students who—very surprisingly
—understood almost everything in all of the lectures, and who were quite active
in working with the material and worrying about the many points in an excited
and interested way. These people have now, I believe, a first-rate background in
physics—and they are, after all, the ones I was trying to get at. But then, "The
power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions
where it is almost superfluous." (Gibbon)
Still, I didn't want to leave any student completely behind, as perhaps I did.
I think one way we could help the students more would be by putting more hard
work into developing a set of problems which would elucidate some of the ideas
in the lectures. Problems give a good opportunity to fill out the material of the
lectures and make more realistic, more complete, and more settled in the mind
the ideas that have been exposed.
I think, however, that there isn't any solution to this problem of education
other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct
individual relationship between a student and a good teacher—a situation in which
the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things.
It's impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture, or even by simply
doing problems that are assigned. But in our modern times we have so many
students to teach that we have to try to find some substitute for the ideal. Perhaps
my lectures can make some contribution. Perhaps in some small place where
there are individual teachers and students, they may get some inspiration or some
ideas from the lectures. Perhaps they will have fun thinking them through—or
going on to develop some of the ideas further.
RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
June, 1963
Foreword
This book is based upon a course of lectures in introductory physics given by
Prof. R. P. Feynman at the California Institute of Technology during the academic
year 1961-62; it covers the first year of the two-year introductory course taken by
all Caltech freshmen and sophomores, and was followed in 1962-63 by a similar
series covering the second year. The lectures constitute a major part of a fundamental revision of the introductory course, carried out over a four-year period.
The need for a basic revision arose both from the rapid development of physics
in recent decades and from the fact that entering freshmen have shown a steady
increase in mathematical ability as a result of improvements in high school mathematics course content. We hoped to take advantage of this improved mathematical
background, and also to introduce enough modern subject matter to make the
course challenging, interesting, and more representative of present-day physics.
In order to generate a variety of ideas on what material to include and how to
present it, a substantial number of the physics faculty were encouraged to offer
their ideas in the form of topical outlines for a revised course. Several of these
were presented and were thoroughly and critically discussed. It was agreed almost
at once that a basic revision of the course could not be accomplished either by
merely adopting a different textbook, or even by writing one ab initio, but that
the new course should be centered about a set of lectures, to be presented at the
rate of two or three per week; the appropriate text material would then be produced
as a secondary operation as the course developed, and suitable laboratory experiments would also be arranged to fit the lecture material. Accordingly, a rough
outline of the course was established, but this was recognized as being incomplete,
tentative, and subject to considerable modification by whoever was to bear the
responsibility for actually preparing the lectures.
Concerning the mechanism by which the course would finally be brought to
life, several plans were considered. These plans were mostly rather similar, involving a cooperative effort by N staff members who would share the total burden
symmetrically and equally: each man would take responsibility for 1/N of the
material, deliver the lectures, and write text material for his part. However, the
unavailability of sufficient staff, and the difficulty of maintaining a uniform point
of view because of differences in personality and philosophy of individual participants, made such plans seem unworkable.
The realization that we actually possessed the means to create not just a new
and different physics course, but possibly a unique one, came as a happy inspiration to Professor Sands. He suggested that Professor R. P. Feynman prepare and
deliver the lectures, and that these be tape-recorded. When transcribed and edited,
they would then become the textbook for the new course. This is essentially the
plan that was adopted.
It was expected that the necessary editing would be minor, mainly consisting of
supplying figures, and checking punctuation and grammar; it was to be done by
one or two graduate students on a part-time basis. Unfortunately, this expectation
was short-lived. It was, in fact, a major editorial operation to transform the verbatim transcript into readable form, even without the reorganization or revision
of The subject matter that was sometimes required. Furthermore, it was not a
job for a technical editor or for a graduate student, but one that required the close
attention of a professional physicist for from ten to twenty hours per lecture!
7
The difficulty of the editorial task, together with the need to place the material
in the hands of the students as soon as possible, set a strict limit upon the amount
of "polishing" of the material that could be accomplished, and thus we were
forced to aim toward a preliminary but technically correct product that could be
used immediately, rather than one that might be considered final or finished.
Because of an urgent need for more copies for our students, and a heartening interest on the part of instructors and students at several other institutions, we decided
to publish the material in its preliminary form rather than wait for a further major
revision which might never occur. We have no illusions as to the completeness,
smoothness, or logical organization of the material; in fact, we plan several minor
modifications in the course in the immediate future, and we hope that it will not
become static in form or content.
In addition to the lectures, which constitute a centrally important part of the
course, it was necessary also to provide suitable exercises to develop the students'
experience and ability, and suitable experiments to provide first-hand contact
with the lecture material in the laboratory. Neither of these aspects is in as advanced a state as the lecture material, but considerable progress has been made.
Some exercises were made up as the lectures progressed, and these were expanded
and amplified for use in the following year. However, because we are not yet
satisfied that the exercises provide sufficient variety and depth of application of
the lecture material to make the student fully aware of the tremendous power
being placed at his disposal, the exercises are published separately in a less permanent form in order to encourage frequent revision.
A number of new experiments for the new course have been devised by Professor
H. V. Neher. Among these are several which utilize the extremely low friction
exhibited by a gas bearing: a novel linear air trough, with which quantitative
measurements of one-dimensional motion, impacts, and harmonic motion can be
made, and an air-supported, air-driven Maxwell top, with which accelerated rotational motion and gyroscopic precession and nutation can be studied. The development of new laboratory experiments is expected to continue for a considerable
period of time.
The revision program was under the direction of Professors R. B. Leighton,
H. V. Neher, and M. Sands. Officially participating in the program were Professors
R. P. Feynman, G. Neugebauer, R. M. Sutton, H. P. Stabler,* F. Strong, and
R. Vogt, from the division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, and Professors
T. Caughey, M. Plesset, and C. H. Wilts from the division of Engineering Science.
The valuable assistance of all those contributing to the revision program is gratefully acknowledged. We are particularly indebted to the Ford Foundation, without
whose financial assistance this program could not have been carried out.
ROBERT B. LEIGHTON
July, 1963
* 1961-62, while on leave from Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.
Contents
CHAPTER 1.
1-1
1-2
1-3
1-4
Introduction 1-1
Matter is made of atoms 1-2
Atomic processes 1-5
Chemical reactions 1-6
CHAPTER 2.
2-1
2-2
2-3
2-4
4-1
4-2
4-3
4-4
PROBABILITY
Chance and likelihood 6-1
Fluctuations 6-3
The random walk 6-5
A probability distribution 6-7
The uncertainty principle 6-10
CHAPTER 7.
7-1
7-2
7-3
7-4
7-5
7-6
7-7
7-8
TIME AND DISTANCE
Motion 5-1
Time 5-1
Short times 5-2
Long times 5-3
Units and standards of time 5-5
Large distances 5-5
Short distances 5-8
CHAPTER 6.
6-1
6-2
6-3
6-4
6-5
CONSERVATION OF ENERGY
What is energy? 4-1
Gravitational potential energy 4-2
Kinetic energy 4-5
Other forms of energy 4-6
CHAPTER 5.
5-1
5-2
5-3
5-4
5-5
5-6
5-7
THE RELATION OF PHYSICS TO OTHER SCIENCES
Introduction 3-1
Chemistry 3-1
Biology 3-2
Astronomy 3-6
Geology 3-7
Psychology 3-8
How did it get that way? 3-9
CHAPTER 4.
CHAPTER 8.
8-1
8-2
8-3
8-4
8-5
MOTION
Description of motion 8-1
Speed 8-2
Speed as a derivative 8-5
Distance as an integral 8-7
Acceleration 8-8
BASIC PHYSICS
Introduction 2-1
Physics before 1920 2-3
Quantum physics 2-6
Nuclei and particles 2-8
CHAPTER 3.
3-1
3-2
3-3
3-4
3-5
3-6
3-7
ATOMS IN MOTION
THE THEORY OF GRAVITATION
Planetary motions 7-1
Kepler's laws 7-1
Development of dynamics 7-2
Newton's law of gravitation 7-3
Universal gravitation 7-5
Cavendish's experiment 7-9
What is gravity? 7-9
Gravity and relativity 7-11
CHAPTER 9.
9-1
9-2
9-3
9-4
9-5
9-6
9-7
Momentum and force 9-1
Speed and velocity 9-2
Components of velocity, acceleration, and force 9-3
What is the force? 9-3
Meaning of the dynamical equations 9-4
Numerical solution of the equations 9-5
Planetary motions 9-6
CHAPTER 10.
10-1
10-2
10-3
10-4
10-5
NEWTON'S LAWS OF DYNAMICS
CONSERVATION OF MOMENTUM
Newton's Third Law 10-1
Conservation of momentum 10-2
Momentum is conserved! 10-5
Momentum and energy 10-7
Relativistic momentum 10-8
CHAPTER 11. VECTORS
11-1
11-2
11-3
11-4
11-5
11-6
11-7
Symmetry in physics 11-1
Translations 11-1
Rotations 11-3
Vectors 11-5
Vector algebra 11-6
Newton's laws in vector notation 11-7
Scalar product of vectors 11-8
CHAPTER 12.
CHARACTERISTICS OF FORCE
12-1 What is a force? 12-1
12-2 Friction 12-3
12-3 Molecular forces 12-6
12-4 Fundamental forces. Fields 12-7
12-5 Pseudo forces 12-10
12-6 Nuclear forces 12-12
CHAPTER 13.
WORK AND POTENTIAL ENERGY (A)
13-1 Energy of a falling body 13-1
13-2 Work done by gravity 13-3
13-3 Summation of energy 13-6
13-4 Gravitational field of large objects 13-8
CHAPTER 14. WORK AND POTENTIAL ENERGY (conclusion)
14-1
14-2
14-3
14-4
14-5
Work 14-1
Constrained motion 14-3
Conservative forces 14-3
Nonconservative forces 14-6
Potentials and fields 14-7
CHAPTER 15.
15-1
15-2
15-3
15-4
15-5
15-6
15-7
15-8
15-9
THE SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY
The principle of relativity 15-1
The Lorentz transformation 15-3
The Michelson-Morley experiment 15-3
Transformation of time 15-5
The Lorentz contraction 15-7
Simultaneity 15-7
Four-vectors 15-8
Relativistic dynamics 15-9
Equivalence of mass and energy 15-10
CHAPTER 16. RELATIVISTIC ENERGY AND MOMENTUM
16-1
16-2
16-3
16-4
16-5
Relativity and the philosophers 16-1
The twin paradox 16-3
Transformation of velocities 16-4
Relativistic mass 16-6
Relativistic energy 16-8
CHAPTER 17.
17-1
17-2
17-3
17-4
17-5
The geometry of space-time 17-1
Space-time intervals 17-2
Past, present, and future 17-4
More about four-vectors 17-5
Four-vector algebra 17-7.
CHAPTER 18.
18-1
18-2
18-3
18-4
SPACE-TIME
ROTATION IN Two DIMENSIONS
The center of mass 18-1
Rotation of a rigid body 18-2
Angular momentum 18-5
Conservation of angular momentum 18-6
CHAPTER 19. CENTER OF MASS; MOMENT OF INERTIA
19-1 Properties of the center of mass 19-1
19-2 Locating the center of mass 19-4
19-3 Finding the moment of inertia 19-5
19-4 Rotational kinetic energy 19-7
CHAPTER 20.
20-1
20-2
20-3
20-4
Torques in three dimensions 20-1
The rotation equations using cross products 20-4
The gyroscope 20-5
Angular momentum of a solid body 20-8
CHAPTER 21.
21-1
21-2
21-3
21-4
21-5
ROTATION IN SPACE
THE HARMONIC OSCILLATOR
Linear differential equations 21-1
The harmonic oscillator 21-1
Harmonic motion and circular motion 21-4
Initial conditions 21-4
Forced oscillations 21-5
CHAPTER 22. ALGEBRA
22-1
22-2
22-3
22-4
22-5
22-6
Addition and multiplication 22-1
The inverse operations 22-2
Abstraction and generalization 22-3
Approximating irrational numbers 22-4
Complex numbers 22-7
Imaginary exponents 22-9
CHAPTER 23.
23-1
23-2
10
RESONANCE
Complex numbers and harmonic motion 23-1
The forced oscillator with damping 23-3
23-3
23-4
Electrical resonance 23-5
Resonance in nature 23-7
CHAPTER 24.
24-1
24-2
24-3
CHAPTER 25.
25-1
25-2
25-3
25-4
25-5
LINEAR SYSTEMS AND REVIEW
Linear differential equations 25-1
Superposition of solutions 25-2
Oscillations in linear systems 25-5
Analogs in physics 25-6
Series and parallel impedances 25-8
CHAPTER 26.
26-1
26-2
26-3
26-4
26-5
26-6
TRANSIENTS
The energy of an oscillator 24-1
Damped oscillations 24-2
Electrical transients 24-5
OPTICS: THE PRINCIPLE OF LEAST TIME
Light 26-1
Reflection and refraction 26-2
Fermat's principle of least time 26-3
Applications of Fermat's principle 26-5
A more precise statement of Fermat's principle 26-7
How it works 26-8
CHAPTER 27. GEOMETRICAL OPTICS
27-1 Introduction 27-1
27-2 The focal length of a spherical surface 27-1
27-3 The focal length of a lens 27-4
27-4 Magnification 27-5
27-5 Compound lenses 27-6
27-6 Aberrations 27-7
27-7 Resolving power 27-7
CHAPTER 28.
28-1
28-2
28-3
28-4
ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION
Electromagnetism 28-1
Radiation 28-3
The dipole radiator 28-5
Interference 28-6
CHAPTER 29. INTERFERENCE
29-1
29-2
29-3
29-4
29-5
Electromagnetic waves 29-1
Energy of radiation 29-2
Sinusoidal waves 29-2
Two dipole radiators 29-3
The mathematics of interference 29-5
CHAPTER 30.
DIFFRACTION
30-1 The resultant amplitude due to n equal oscillators 30-1
30-2 The diffraction grating 30-3
30-3 Resolving power of a grating 30-5
30-4 The parabolic antenna 30-6
30-5 Colored films; crystals 30-7
30-6 Diffraction by opaque screens 30-8
30-7 The field of a plane of oscillating charges 30-10
CHAPTER 31.
THE ORIGIN OF THE REFRACTIVE INDEX
31-1 The index of refraction 31-1
31-2 The field due to the material 31-4
31-3 Dispersion 31-6
31-4 Absorption 31-8
31-5 The energy carried by an electric wave 31-9
31-6 Diffraction of light by a screen 31-10
CHAPTER 32.
32-1
32-2
32-3
32-4
32-5
RADIATION DAMPING. LIGHT SCATTERING
Radiation resistance 32-1
The rate of radiation of energy 3.2-2
Radiation damping 32-3
Independent sources 32-5
Scattering of light 32-6
39-1
39-2
39-3
39-4
39-5
The electric vector of light 33-1
Polarization of scattered light 33-3
Birefringence 33-3
Polarizers 33-5
Optical activity 33-6
The intensity of reflected light 33-7
Anomalous refraction 33-9
Moving sources 34-1
Finding the "apparent" motion 34-2
Synchrotron radiation 34-3
Cosmic synchrotron radiation 34-6
Bremsstrahlung 34-6
The Doppler effect 34-7
The w, k four-vector 34-9
Aberration 34-10
The momentum of light 34-10
The human eye 35-1
Color depends on intensity 35-2
Measuring the color sensation 35-3
The chromaticity diagram 35-6
The mechanism of color vision 35-7
Physiochemistry of color vision 35-9
CHAPTER 42.
APPLICATIONS OP KINETIC THEORY
42-1 Evaporation 42-1
42-2 Thermionic emission 42-4
42-3 Thermal ionization 42-5
42-4 Chemical kinetics 42-7
42-5 Einstein's laws of radiation 42-8
/
The sensation of color 36-1
The physiology of the eye 36-3
The rod cells 36-6
The compound (insect) eye 36-6
Other eyes 36-9
Neurology of vision 36-9
CHAPTER 37. QUANTUM BEHAVIOR
37-1
37-2
37-3
37-4
37-5
37-6
37-7
37-8
THE BROWNIAN MOVEMENT
41-1 Equipartition of energy 41-1
41-2 Thermal equilibrium of radiation 41-3
41-3 Equipartition and the quantum oscillator 41-6
41-4 The random walk 41-8
CHAPTER 36. MECHANISMS OF SEEING
36-1
36-2
36-3
36-4
36-5
36-6
THE PRINCIPLES OF STATISTICAL MECHANICS
40-1 The exponential atmosphere 40-1
40-2 The Boltzmann law 40-2
40-3 Evaporation of a liquid 40-3
40-4 The distribution of molecular speeds 40-4
40-5 The specific heats of gases 40-7
40-6 The failure of classical physics 40-8
CHAPTER 41.
CHAPTER 35. COLOR VISION
35-1
35-2
35-3
35-4
35-5
35-6
Properties of matter 39-1
The pressure of a gas 39-2
Compressibility of radiation 39-6
Temperature and kinetic energy 39-6
The ideal gas law 39-10
CHAPTER 40.
CHAPTER 34. RELATIVISTIC EFFECTS IN RADIATION
34-1
34-2
34-3
34-4
34-5
34-6
34-7
34-8
34-9
Energy levels 38-7
Philosophical implications 38-8
CHAPTER 39. THE KINETIC THEORY OF GASES
CHAPTER 33. POLARIZATION
33-1
33-2
33-3
33-4
33-5
33-6
33-7
38-5
38-6
Atomic mechanics 37-1
An experiment with bullets 37-2
An experiment with waves 37-3
An experiment with electrons 37-4
The interference of electron waves 37-5
Watching the electrons 37-7
First principles of quantum mechanics 37-10
The uncertainty principle 37-11
CHAPTER 38. THE RELATION OF WAVE AND PARTICLE
VIEWPOINTS
38-1 Probability wave amplitudes 38-1
38-2 Measurement of position and momentum 38-2
38-3 Crystal diffraction 38-4
38-4 The size of an atom 38-5
CHAPTER 43.
DIFFUSION
43-1 Collisions between molecules 43-1
43-2 The mean free path 43-3
43-3 The drift speed 43-4
43-4 Ionic conductivity 43-6
43-5 Molecular diffusion 43-7
43-6 Thermal conductivity 43-9
CHAPTER 44. THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS
44-1 Heat engines; the first law 44-1
44-2 The second law 44-3
44-3 Reversible engines 44-4
44-4 The efficiency of an ideal engine 44-7
44-5 The thermodynamic temperature 44-9
44-6 Entropy 44-10
CHAPTER 45. ILLUSTRATIONS OF THERMODYNAMICS
45-1
45-2
45-3
Internal energy 45-1
Applications 45-4
The Clausius-Clapeyron equation 45-6
CHAPTER 46.
RATCHET AND PAWL
46-1 How a ratchet works 46-1
46-2 The ratchet as an engine 46-2
46-3 Reversibility in mechanics 46-4
46-4 Irreversibility 46-5
46-5 Order and entropy 46-7
CHAPTER 47.
SOUND.
THE WAVE EQUATION
47-1 Waves 47-1
47-2 The propagation of sound 47-3
47-3 The wave equation 47-4
47-4 Solutions of the wave equation 47-6
47-5 The speed of sound 47-7
CHAPTER 48.
48-1
48-2
48-3
48-4
48-5
48-6
48-7
BEATS
Adding two waves 48-1
Beat notes and modulation 48-3
Side bands 48-4
Localized wave trains 48-5
Probability amplitudes for particles 48-7
Waves in three dimensions 48-9
Normal modes 48-10
CHAPTER 49.
MODES
49-1 The reflection of waves 49-1
49-2 Confined waves, with natural frequencies 49-2
49-3 Modes in two dimensions 49-3
49-4 Coupled pendulums 49-6
49-5 Linear systems 49-7
INDEX
12
CHAPTER 50.
50-1
50-2
50-3
50-4
50-5
50-6
CHAPTER 51.
51-1
51-2
51-3
51-4
HARMONICS
Musical tones 50-1
The Fourier series 50-2
Quality and consonance 50-3
The Fourier coefficients 50-5
The energy theorem 50-7
Nonlinear responses 50-8
WAVES
Bow waves 51-1
Shock waves 51-2
Waves in solids 51-4
Surface waves 51-7
CHAPTER 52. SYMMETRY IN PHYSICAL LAWS
52-1
52-2
52-3
52-4
52-5
52-6
52-7
52-8
52-9
Symmetry operations 52-1
Symmetry in space and time 52-1
Symmetry and conservation laws 52-3
Mirror reflections 52-4
Polar and axial vectors 52-6
Which hand is right? 52-8
Parity is not conserved! 52-8
Antimatter 52-10
Broken symmetries 52-11
Atoms in Motion
1-1 Introduction
This two-year course in physics is presented from the point of view that you,
the reader, are going to be a physicist. This is not necessarily the case of course,
but that is what every professor in every subject assumes! If you are going to
be a physicist, you will have a lot to study: two hundred years of the most rapidly
developing field of knowledge that there is. So much knowledge, in fact, that
you might think that you cannot learn all of it in four years, and truly you cannot;
you will have to go to graduate school too!
Surprisingly enough, in spite of the tremendous amount of work that has been
done for all this time it is possible to condense the enormous mass of results to
a large extent—that is, to find laws which summarize all our knowledge. Even
so, the laws are so hard to grasp that it is unfair to you to start exploring this
tremendous subject without some kind of map or outline of the relationship of
one part of the subject of science to another. Following these preliminary remarks,
the first three chapters will therefore outline the relation of physics to the rest
of the sciences, the relations of the sciences to each other, and the meaning of
science, to help us develop a "feel" for the subject.
You might ask why we cannot teach physics by just giving the basic laws on
page one and then showing how they work in all possible circumstances, as we do
in Euclidean geometry, where we state the axioms and then make all sorts of deductions. (So, not satisfied to learn physics in four years, you want to learn it in
four minutes?) We cannot do it in this way for two reasons. First, we do not yet
know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance. Second, the
correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas
which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore, one needs
a considerable amount of preparatory training even to learn what the words
mean. No, it is not possible to do it that way. We can only do it piece by piece.
Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation
to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do
not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned
again or, more likely, to be corrected.
The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of
all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth."
But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested
come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it
gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great
generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the
right guess. This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor
in physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new
laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.
We said that the laws of nature are approximate: that we first find the "wrong"
ones, and then we find the "right" ones. Now, how can an experiment be "wrong" ?
First, in a trivial way: if something is wrong with the apparatus that you did not
notice. But these things are easily fixed, and checked back and forth. So without
snatching at such minor things, how can the results of an experiment be wrong?
Only by being inaccurate. For example, the mass of an object never seems to
1-1
1-1 Introduction
1-2 Matter is made of atoms
1-3 Atomic processes
1-4 Chemical reactions
change; a spinning top has the same weight as a still one. So a "law" was invented: mass is constant, independent of speed. That "law" is now found to be
incorrect. Mass is found to increase with velocity, but appreciable increases require
velocities near that of light. A true law is: if an object moves with a speed of
less than one hundred miles a second the mass is constant to within one part in
a million. In some such approximate form this is a correct law. So in practice
one might think that the new law makes no significant difference. Well, yes and
no. For ordinary speeds we can certainly forget it and use the simple constantmass law as a good approximation. But for high speeds we are wrong, and the
higher the speed, the more wrong we are.
Finally, and most interesting, philosophically we are completely wrong with
the approximate law. Our entire picture of the world has to be altered even though
the mass changes only by a little bit. This is a very peculiar thing about the
philosophy, or the ideas, behind the laws. Even a very small effect sometimes
requires profound changes in our ideas.
Now, what should we teach first? Should we teach the correct but unfamiliar
law with its strange and difficult conceptual ideas, for example the theory of
relativity, four-dimensional space-time, and so on? Or should we first teach the
simple "constant-mass" law, which is only approximate, but does not involve such
difficult ideas? The first is more exciting, more wonderful, and more fun, but the
second is easier to get at first, and is a first step to a real understanding of the
second idea. This point arises again and again in teaching physics. At different
times we shall have to resolve it in different ways, but at each stage it is worth
learning what is now known, how accurate it is, how it fits into everything else,
and how it may be changed when we learn more.
Let us now proceed with our outline, or general map, of our understanding
of science today (in particular, physics, but also of other sciences on the periphery),
so that when we later concentrate on some particular point we will have some idea
of the background, why that particular point is interesting, and how it fits into
the big structure. So, what is our over-all picture of the world?
1-2 Matter is made of atoms
WATER MAGNIFIED ONE BILLION TIMES
Figure 1-1
If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only
one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would
contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic
hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are
made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting
each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed
into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount
of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
To illustrate the power of the atomic idea, suppose that we have a drop of
water a quarter of an inch on the side. If we look at it very closely we see nothing
but water—smooth, continuous water. Even if we magnify it with the best optical
microscope available—roughly two thousand times—then the water drop will be
roughly forty feet across, about as big as a large room, and if we looked rather
closely, we would still see relatively smooth water—but here and there small
football-shaped things swimming back and forth. Very interesting. These are
paramecia. You may stop at this point and get so curious about the paramecia
with their wiggling cilia and twisting bodies that you go no further, except perhaps to magnify the paramecia still more and see inside. This, of course, is a subject
for biology, but for the present we pass on and look still more closely at the water
material itself, magnifying it two thousand times again. Now the drop of water
extends about fifteen miles across, and if we look very closely at it we see a kind
of teeming, something which no longer has a smooth appearance—it looks something like a crowd at a football game as seen from a very great distance. In order
to see what this teeming is about, we will magnify it another two hundred and
fifty times and we will see something similar to what is shown in Fig. 1-1. This
is a picture of water magnified a billion times, but idealized in several ways.
1-2
In the first place, the particles are drawn in a simple manner with sharp edges,
which is inaccurate. Secondly, for simplicity, they are sketched almost schematically in a two-dimensional arrangement, but of course they are moving around in
three dimensions. Notice that there are two kinds of "blobs" or circles to represent
the atoms of oxygen (black) and hydrogen (white), and that each oxygen has two
hydrogens tied to it. (Each little group of an oxygen with its two hydrogens is
called a molecule.) The picture is idealized further in that the real particles in
nature are continually jiggling and bouncing, turning and twisting around one
another. You will have to imagine this as a dynamic rather than a static picture.
Another thing that cannot be illustrated in a drawing is the fact that the particles
are "stuck together"—that they attract each other, this one pulled by that one,
etc. The whole group is "glued together," so to speak. On the other hand, the
particles do not squeeze through each other. If you try to squeeze two of them too
close together, they repel.
The atoms are 1 or 2 X 10-8 cm in radius. Now 10-8 cm is called an
angstrom (just as another name), so we say they are 1 or 2 angstroms (Å) in radius.
Another way to remember their size is this: if an apple is magnified to the size
of the earth, then the atoms in the apple are approximately the size of the original
apple.
Now imagine this great drop of water with all of these jiggling particles stuck
together and tagging along with each other. The water keeps its volume; it does
not fall apart, because of the attraction of the molecules for each other. If the
drop is on a slope, where it can move from one place to another, the water will
flow, but it does not just disappear—things do not just fly apart—because of
the molecular attraction. Now the jiggling motion is what we represent as heat:
when we increase the temperature, we increase the motion. If we heat the water,
the jiggling increases and the volume between the atoms increases, and if the
heating continues there comes a time when the pull between the molecules is not
enough to hold them together and they do fly apart and become separated from
one another. Of course, this is how we manufacture steam out of water—by
increasing the temperature; the particles fly apart because of the increased motion.
In Fig. 1-2 we have a picture of steam. This picture of steam fails in one
respect: at ordinary atmospheric pressure there might be only a few molecules in
a whole room, and there certainly would not be as many as three in this figure.
Most squares this size would contain none—but we accidentally have two and a
half or three in the picture (just so it would not be completely blank). Now in
the case of steam we see the characteristic molecules more clearly than in the case
of water. For simplicity, the molecules are drawn so that there is a 120° angle
between them. In actual fact the angle is 105°3', and the distance between the
center of a hydrogen and the center of the oxygen is 0.957 Å, so we know this
molecule very well.
Let us see what some of the properties of steam vapor or any other gas are.
The molecules, being separated from one another, will bounce against the walls.
Imagine a room with a number of tennis balls (a hundred or so) bouncing around
in perpetual motion. When they bombard the wall, this pushes the wall away.
(Of course we would have to push the wall back.) This means that the gas exerts
a jittery force which our coarse senses (not being ourselves magnified a billion
times) feels only as an average push. In order to confine a gas we must apply a
pressure. Figure 1-3 shows a standard vessel for holding gases (used in all
textbooks), a cylinder with a piston in it. Now, it makes no difference what the
shapes of water molecules are, so for simplicity we shall draw them as tennis
balls or little dots. These things are in perpetual motion in all directions. So many
of them are hitting the top piston all the time that to keep it from being patiently
knocked out of the tank by this continuous banging, we shall have to hold the
piston down by a certain force, which we call the pressure (really, the pressure
times the area is the force). Clearly, the force is proportional to the area, for if
we increase the area but keep the number of molecules per cubic centimeter the
same, we increase the number of collisions with the piston in the same proportion
as the area was increased.
1-3
Figure 1-2
Figure
1-3
Figure 1-4
Now let us put twice as many molecules in this tank, so as to double the density, and let them have the same speed, i.e., the same temperature. Then, to a
close approximation, the number of collisions will be doubled, and since each will
be just as "energetic" as before, the pressure is proportional to the density. If we
consider the true nature of the forces between the atoms, we would expect a slight
decrease in pressure because of the attraction between the atoms, and a slight
increase because of the finite volume they occupy. Nevertheless, to an excellent
approximation, if the density is low enough that there are not many atoms, the
pressure is proportional to the density.
We can also see something else: If we increase the temperature without
changing the density of the gas, i.e., if we increase the speed of the atoms, what
is going to happen to the pressure? Well, the atoms hit harder because they are
moving faster, and in addition they hit more often, so the pressure increases.
You see how simple the ideas of atomic theory are.
Let us consider another situation. Suppose that the piston moves inward,
so that the atoms are slowly compressed into a smaller space. What happens when
an atom hits the moving piston? Evidently it picks up speed from the collision.
You can try it by bouncing a ping-pong ball from a forward-moving paddle, for
example, and you will find that it comes off with more speed than that with which
it struck. (Special example: if an atom happens to be standing still and the piston
hits it, it will certainly move.) So the atoms are "hotter" when they come away
from the piston than they were before they struck it. Therefore all the atoms which
are in the vessel will have picked up speed. This means that when we compress
a gas slowly, the temperature of the gas increases. So, under slow compression,
a gas will increase in temperature, and under slow expansion it will decrease in
temperature.
We now return to our drop of water and look in another direction. Suppose
that we decrease the temperature of our drop of water. Suppose that the jiggling
of the molecules of the atoms in the water is steadily decreasing. We know that
there are forces of attraction between the atoms, so that after a while they will
not be able to jiggle so well. What will happen at very low temperatures is indicated in Fig. 1-4: the molecules lock into a new pattern which is ice. This
particular schematic diagram of ice is wrong because it is in two dimensions, but
it is right qualitatively. The interesting point is that the material has a definite
place for every atom, and you can easily appreciate that if somehow or other we
were to hold all the atoms at one end of the drop in a certain arrangement, each
atom in a certain place, then because of the structure of interconnections, which is
rigid, the other end miles away (at our magnified scale) will have a definite location.
So if we hold a needle of ice at one end, the other end resists our pushing it aside,
unlike the case of water, in which the structure is broken down because of the
increased jiggling so that the atoms all move around in different ways. The difference between solids and liquids is, then, that in a solid the atoms are arranged in
some kind of an array, called a crystalline array, and they do not have a random
position at long distances; the position of the atoms on one side of the crystal
is determined by that of other atoms millions of atoms away on the other side of
the crystal. Figure 1-4 is an invented arrangement for ice, and although it contains many of the correct features of ice, it is not the true arrangement. One of the
correct features is that there is a part of the symmetry that is hexagonal. You can
see that if we turn the picture around an axis by 120°, the picture returns to itself.
So there is a symmetry in the ice which accounts for the six-sided appearance of
snowflakes. Another thing we can see from Fig. 1-4 is why ice shrinks when it
melts. The particular crystal pattern of ice shown here has many "holes" in it,
as does the true ice structure. When the organization breaks down, these holes
can be occupied by molecules. Most simple substances, with the exception of
water and type metal, expand upon melting, because the atoms are closely packed
in the solid crystal and upon melting need more room to jiggle around, but an
open structure collapses, as in the case of water.
Now although ice has a "rigid" crystalline form, its temperature can change—
ice has heat. If we wish, we can change the amount of heat. What is the heat in
1-4
the case of ice? The atoms are not standing still. They are jiggling and vibrating.
So even though there is a definite order to the crystal—a definite structure—all
of the atoms are vibrating "in place." As we increase the temperature, they vibrate
with greater and greater amplitude, until they shake themselves out of place.
We call this melting. As we decrease the temperature, the vibration decreases
and decreases until, at absolute zero, there is a minimum amount of vibration
that the atoms can have, but not zero. This minimum amount of motion that atoms
can have is not enough to melt a substance, with one exception: helium. Helium
merely decreases the atomic motions as much as it can, but even at absolute zero
there is still enough motion to keep it from freezing. Helium, even at absolute
zero, does not freeze, unless the pressure is made so great as to make the atoms
squash together. If we increase the pressure, we can make it solidify.
1-3 Atomic processes
So much for the description of solids, liquids, and gases from the atomic
point of view. However, the atomic hypothesis also describes processes, and so we
shall now look at a number of processes from an atomic standpoint. The first
process that we shall look at is associated with the surface of the water. What
happens at the surface of the water? We shall now make the picture more complicated—and more realistic—by imagining that the surface is in air. Figure 1-5
shows the surface of water in air. We see the water molecules as before, forming
a body of liquid water, but now we also see the surface of the water. Above the
surface we find a number of things: First of all there are water molecules, as in steam.
This is water vapor, which is always found above liquid water. (There is an
equilibrium between the steam vapor and the water which will be described later.)
In addition we find some other molecules—here two oxygen atoms stuck together
by themselves, forming an oxygen molecule, there two nitrogen atoms also stuck
together to make a nitrogen molecule. Air consists almost entirely of nitrogen,
oxygen, some water vapor, and lesser amounts of carbon dioxide, argon, and
other things. So above the water surface is the air, a gas, containing some water
vapor. Now what is happening in this picture? The molecules in the water are
always jiggling around. From time to time, one on the surface happens to be hit
a little harder than usual, and gets knocked away. It is hard to see that happening
in the picture because it is a still picture. But we can imagine that one molecule
near the surface has just been hit and is flying out, or perhaps another one has
been hit and is flying out. Thus, molecule by molecule, the water disappears—
it evaporates. But if we close the vessel above, after a while we shall find a large
number of molecules of water amongst the air molecules. From time to time, one
of these vapor molecules comes flying down to the water and gets stuck again.
So we see that what looks like a dead, uninteresting thing—a glass of water with
a cover, that has been sitting there for perhaps twenty years—really contains a
dynamic and interesting phenomenon which is going on all the time. To our eyes,
our crude eyes, nothing is changing, but if we could see it a billion times magnified, we would see that from its own point of view it is always changing: molecules
are leaving the surface, molecules are coming back.
Why do we see no change? Because just as many molecules are leaving as
are coming back! In the long run "nothing happens." If we then take the top of
the vessel off and blow the moist air away, replacing it with dry air, then the
number of molecules leaving is just the same as it was before, because this depends
on the jiggling of the water, but the number coming back is greatly reduced because there are so many fewer water molecules above the water. Therefore there
are more going out than coming in, and the water evaporates. Hence, if you wish
to evaporate water turn on the fan!
Here is something else: Which molecules leave? When a molecule leaves it
is due to an accidental, extra accumulation of a little bit more than ordinary
energy, which it needs if it is to break away from the attractions of its neighbors.
Therefore, since those that leave have more energy than the average, the ones that
are left have less average motion than they had before. So the liquid gradually
1-5
Figure 1-5
Figure 1-6
Nearest neighbor
distance d=a/2
Figure 1-7
cools if it evaporates. Of course, when a molecule of vapor comes from the air to
the water below there is a sudden great attraction as the molecule approaches
the surface. This speeds up the incoming molecule and results in generation of
heat. So when they leave they take away heat; when they come back they generate
heat. Of course when there is no net evaporation the result is nothing—the water
is not changing temperature. If we blow on the water so as to maintain a continuous
preponderance in the number evaporating, then the water is cooled. Hence,
blow on soup to cool it!
Of course you should realize that the processes just described are more complicated than we have indicated. Not only does the water go into the air, but also,
from time to time, one of the oxygen or nitrogen molecules will come in and "get
lost" in the mass of water molecules, and work its way into the water. Thus the
air dissolves in the water; oxygen and nitrogen molecules will work their way into
the water and the water will contain air. If we suddenly take the air away from the
vessel, then the air molecules will leave more rapidly than they come in, and in
doing so will make bubbles. This is very bad for divers, as you may know.
Now we go on to another process. In Fig. 1-6 we see, from an atomic point
of view, a solid dissolving in water. If we put a crystal of salt in the water, what
will happen? Salt is a solid, a crystal, an organized arrangement of "salt atoms."
Figure 1-7 is an illustration of the three-dimensional structure of common salt,
sodium chloride. Strictly speaking, the crystal is not made of atoms, but of what
we call ions. An ion is an atom which either has a few extra electrons or has lost
a few electrons. In a salt crystal we find chlorine ions (chlorine atoms with an
extra electron) and sodium ions (sodium atoms with one electron missing). The
ions all stick together by electrical attraction in the solid salt, but when we put
them in the water we find, because of the attractions of the negative oxygen and
positive hydrogen for the ions, that some of the ions jiggle loose. In Fig. 1-6
we see a chlorine ion getting loose, and other atoms floating in the water in the form
of ions. This picture was made with some care. Notice, for example, that the
hydrogen ends of the water molecules are more likely to be near the chlorine ion,
while near the sodium ion we are more likely to find the oxygen end, because the
sodium is positive and the oxygen end of the water is negative, and they attract
electrically. Can we tell from this picture whether the salt is dissolving in water or
crystallizing out of water? Of course we cannot tell, because while some of the
atoms are leaving the crystal other atoms are rejoining it. The process is a dynamic
one, just as in the case of evaporation, and it depends on whether there is more or
less salt in the water than the amount needed for equilibrium. By equilibrium we
mean that situation in which the rate at which atoms are leaving just matches the
rate at which they are coming back. If there is almost no salt in the water, more
atoms leave than return, and the salt dissolves. If, on the other hand, there are
too many "salt atoms," more return than leave, and the salt is crystallizing.
In passing, we mention that the concept of a molecule of a substance is only
approximate and exists only for a certain class of substances. It is clear in the
case of water that the three atoms are actually stuck together. It is not so clear
in the case of sodium chloride in the solid. There is just an arrangement of sodium
and chlorine ions in a cubic pattern. There is no natural way to group them as
"molecules of salt."
Returning to our discussion of solution and precipitation, if we increase the
temperature of the salt solution, then the rate at which atoms are taken away is
increased, and so is the rate at which atoms are brought back. It turns out to be
very difficult, in general, to predict which way it is going to go, whether more or
less of the solid will dissolve. Most substances dissolve more, but some substances
dissolve less, as the temperature increases.
1-4 Chemical reactions
In all of the processes which have been described so far, the atoms and the
ions have not changed partners, but of course there are circumstances in which
the atoms do change combinations, forming new molecules. This is illustrated in
1-6
Fig. 1-8. A process in which the rearrangement of the atomic partners occurs is
what we call a chemical reaction. The other processes so far described are called
physical processes, but there is no sharp distinction between the two. (Nature
does not care what we call it, she just keeps on doing it.) This figure is supposed
to represent carbon burning in oxygen. In the case of oxygen, two oxygen atoms
stick together very strongly. (Why do not three or even four stick together? That
is one of the very peculiar characteristics of such atomic processes. Atoms are
very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and
so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants. At
any rate, two oxygen atoms form, saturated and happy, a molecule.)
The carbon atoms are supposed to be in a solid crystal (which could be graphite
or diamond*). Now, for example, one of the oxygen molecules can come over to
the carbon, and each atom can pick up a carbon atom and go flying off in a new
combination—"carbon-oxygen"—which is a molecule of the gas called carbon
monoxide. It is given the chemical name CO. It is very simple: the letters "CO"
are practically a picture of that molecule. But carbon attracts oxygen much more
than oxygen attracts oxygen or carbon attracts carbon. Therefore in this process
the oxygen may arrive with only a little energy, but the oxygen and carbon will
snap together with a tremendous vengeance and commotion, and everything near
them will pick up the energy. A large amount of motion energy, kinetic energy,
is thus generated. This of course is burning; we are getting heat from the combination of oxygen and carbon. The heat is ordinarily in the form of the molecular
motion of the hot gas, but in certain circumstances it can be so enormous that it
generates light. That is how one gets flames.
In addition, the carbon monoxide is not quite satisfied. It is possible for it
to attach another oxygen, so that we might have a much more complicated reaction in which the oxygen is combining with the carbon, while at the same time there
happens to be a collision with a carbon monoxide molecule. One oxygen atom
could attach itself to the CO and ultimately form a molecule, composed of one
carbon and two oxygens, which is designated CO 2 and called carbon dioxide.
If we burn the carbon with very little oxygen in a very rapid reaction (for example,
in an automobile engine, where the explosion is so fast that there is not time for
it to make carbon dioxide) a considerable amount of carbon monoxide is formed.
In many such rearrangements, a very large amount of energy is released, forming
explosions, flames, etc., depending on the reactions. Chemists have studied these
arrangements of the atoms, and found that every substance is some type of arrangement of atoms.
To illustrate this idea, let us consider another example. If we go into a field
of small violets, we know what "that smell" is. It is some kind of molecule, or
arrangement of atoms, that has worked its way into our noses. First of all, how
did it work its way in? That is rather easy. If the smell is some kind of molecule
in the air, jiggling around and being knocked every which way, it might have
accidentally worked its way into the nose. Certainly it has no particular desire to
get into our nose. It is merely one helpless part of a jostling crowd of molecules,
and in its aimless wanderings this particular chunk of matter happens to find
itself in the nose.
Now chemists can take special molecules like the odor of violets, and analyze
them and tell us the exact arrangement of the atoms in space. We know that the
carbon dioxide molecule is straight and symmetrical: O—C—O. (That can be determined easily, too, by physical methods.) However, even for the vastly more complicated arrangements of atoms that there are in chemistry, one can, by a long,
remarkable process of detective work, find the arrangements of the atoms. Figure
1-9 is a picture of the air in the neighborhood of a violet; again we find nitrogen
and oxygen in the air, and water vapor. (Why is there water vapor? Because the
violet is wet. All plants transpire.) However, we also see a "monster" composed
of carbon atoms, hydrogen atoms, and oxygen atoms, which have picked a certain
particular pattern in which to be arranged. It is a much more complicated arrange*One can burn a diamond in air.
1-7
CARBON BURNING IN OXYGEN
Figure 1-8
ODOR OF VIOLETS
Figure 1-9
Fig. 1-10.
a -irone.
The substance pictured is
ment than that of carbon dioxide; in fact, it is an enormously complicated arrangement. Unfortunately, we cannot picture all that is really known about it chemically,
because the precise arrangement of all the atoms is actually known in three
dimensions, while our picture is in only two dimensions. The six carbons which
form a ring do not form a flat ring, but a kind of "puckered" ring. All of the
angles and distances are known. So a chemical formula is merely a picture of such
a molecule. When the chemist writes such a thing on the blackboard, he is trying
to "draw," roughly speaking, in two dimensions. For example, we see a "ring"
of six carbons, and a "chain" of carbons hanging on the end, with an oxygen
second from the end, three hydrogens tied to that carbon, two carbons and three
hydrogens sticking up here, etc.
How does the chemist find what the arrangement is? He mixes bottles full
of stuff together, and if it turns red, it tells him that it consists of one hydrogen and
two carbons tied on here; if it turns blue, on the other hand, that is not the way
it is at all. This is one of the most fantastic pieces of detective work that has ever
been done—organic chemistry. To discover the arrangement of the atoms in these
enormously complicated arrays the chemist looks at what happens when he mixes
two different substances together. The physicist could never quite believe that the
chemist knew what he was talking about when he described the arrangement of
the atoms. For about twenty years it has been possible, in some cases, to look at
such molecules (not quite as complicated as this one, but some which contain
parts of it) by a physical method, and it has been possible to locate every atom,
not by looking at colors, but by measuring where they are. And lo and behold!,
the chemists are almost always correct.
It turns out, in fact, that in the odor of violets there are three slightly different
molecules, which differ only in the arrangement of the hydrogen atoms.
One problem of chemistry is to name a substance, so that we will know what
it is. Find a name for this shape! Not only must the name tell the shape, but it
must also tell that here is an oxygen atom, there a hydrogen—exactly what and
where each atom is. So we can appreciate that the chemical names must be complex in order to be complete. You see that the name of this thing in the more complete form that will tell you the structure of it is 4-(2, 2, 3, 6 tetramethyl-5cyclohexanyl)-3-buten-2-one, and that tells you that this is the arrangement. We
can appreciate the difficulties that the chemists have, and also appreciate the reason
for such long names. It is not that they wish to be obscure, but they have an
extremely difficult problem in trying to describe the molecules in words!
How do we know that there are atoms? By one of the tricks mentioned earlier:
we make the hypothesis that there are atoms, and one after the other results come
out the way we predict, as they ought to if things are made of atoms. There is
also somewhat more direct evidence, a good example of which is the following:
The atoms are so small that you cannot see them with a light microscope—in
fact, not even with an electron microscope. (With a light microscope you can only
see things which are much bigger.) Now if the atoms are always in motion, say in
water, and we put a big ball of something in the water, a ball much bigger than the
atoms, the ball will jiggle around—much as in a push ball game, where a great
big ball is pushed around by a lot of people. The people are pushing in various
directions, and the ball moves around the field in an irregular fashion. So, in the
same way, the "large ball" will move because of the inequalities of the collisions
on one side to the other, from one moment to the next. Therefore, if we look at
very tiny particles (colloids) in water through an excellent microscope, we see
a perpetual jiggling of the particles, which is the result of the bombardment of the
atoms. This is called the Brownian motion.
We can see further evidence for atoms in the structure of crystals. In many
cases the structures deduced by x-ray analysis agree in their spatial "shapes" with
the forms actually exhibited by crystals as they occur in nature. The angles between the various "faces" of a crystal agree, within seconds of arc, with angles
deduced on the assumption that a crystal is made of many "layers" of atoms.
Everything is made of atoms. That is the key hypothesis. The most important
hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms
1-8
do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood
from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws
of physics. This was not known from the beginning: it took some experimenting
and theorizing to suggest this hypothesis, but now it is accepted, and it is the most
useful theory for producing new ideas in the field of biology.
If a piece of steel or a piece of salt, consisting of atoms one next to the other,
can have such interesting properties; if water—which is nothing but these little
blobs, mile upon mile of the same thing over the earth—can form waves and foam,
and make rushing noises and strange patterns as it runs over cement; if all of
this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much
more is possible? If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern,
again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity
like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from
place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually
changing, not repeating, how much more marvelously is it possible that this thing
might behave? Is it possible that that "thing" walking back and forth in front of
you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement,
such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do?
When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms,
because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well
have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror.
1-9
2
Basic Physics
2-1 Introduction
In this chapter, we shall examine the most fundamental ideas that we have
about physics—the nature of things as we see them at the present time. We shall
not discuss the history of how we know that all these ideas are true; you will
learn these details in due time.
The things with which we concern ourselves in science appear in myriad forms,
and with a multitude of attributes. For example, if we stand on the shore and look
at the sea, we see the water, the waves breaking, the foam, the sloshing motion
of the water, the sound, the air, the winds and the clouds, the sun and the blue
sky, and light; there is sand and there are rocks of various hardness and permanence, color and texture. There are animals and seaweed, hunger and disease, and
the observer on the beach; there may be even happiness and thought. Any other
spot in nature has a similar variety of things and influences. It is always as complicated as that, no matter where it is. Curiosity demands that we ask questions,
that we try to put things together and try to understand this multitude of aspects
as perhaps resulting from the action of a relatively small number of elemental
things and forces acting in an infinite variety of combinations.
For example: Is the sand other than the rocks? That is, is the sand perhaps
nothing but a great number of very tiny stones? Is the moon a great rock? If we
understood rocks, would we also understand the sand and the moon? Is the wind
a sloshing of the air analogous to the sloshing motion of the water in the sea?
What common features do different movements have? What is common to different kinds of sound? How many different colors are there? And so on. In this
way we try gradually to analyze all things, to put together things which at first
sight look different, with the hope that we may be able to reduce the number of
different things and thereby understand them better.
A few hundred years ago, a method was devised to find partial answers to
such questions. Observation, reason, and experiment make up what we call the
scientific method. We shall have to limit ourselves to a bare description of our
basic view of what is sometimes called fundamental physics, or fundamental ideas
which have arisen from the application of the scientific method.
What do we mean by "understanding" something? We can imagine that this
complicated array of moving things which constitutes "the world" is something
like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game.
We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to
watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch
on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental
physics. Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited. If you play chess you must know that it is
easy to learn all the rules, and yet it is often very hard to select the best move or
to understand why a player moves as he does. So it is in nature, only much more
so; but we may be able at least to find all the rules. Actually, we do not have all
the rules now. (Every once in a while something like castling is going on that we
still do not understand.) Aside from not knowing all of the rules, what we really
can explain in terms of those rules is very limited, because almost all situations are
so enormously complicated that we cannot follow the plays of the game using the
rules, much less tell what is going to happen next. We must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic question of the rules of the game. If we know the rules,
we consider that we "understand" the world.
2-1
2-1 Introduction
2-2 Physics before 1920
2-3 Quantum physics
2-4 Nuclei and particles
How can we tell whether the rules which we "guess" at are really right if we
cannot analyze the game very well? There are, roughly speaking, three ways. First,
there may be situations where nature has arranged, or we arrange nature, to be
simple and to have so few parts that we can predict exactly what will happen,
and thus we can check how our rules work. (In one corner of the board there may
be only a few chess pieces at work, and that we can figure out exactly.)
A second good way to check rules is in terms of less specific rules derived
from them. For example, the rule on the move of a bishop on a chessboard is
that it moves only on the diagonal. One can deduce, no matter how many moves
may be made, that a certain bishop will always be on a red square. So, without
being able to follow the details, we can always check our idea about the bishop's
motion by finding out whether it is always on a red square. Of course it will be,
for a long time, until all of a sudden we find that it is on a black square (what
happened of course, is that in the meantime it was captured, another pawn crossed
for queening, and it turned into a bishop on a black square). That is the way it is
in physics. For a long time we will have a rule that works excellently in an over-all
way, even when we cannot follow the details, and then some time we may discover
a new rule. From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena
are of course in the new places, the places where the rules do not work—not the
places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.
The third way to tell whether our ideas are right is relatively crude but probably the most powerful of them all. That is, by rough approximation. While we
may not be able to tell why Alekhine moves this particular piece, perhaps we can
roughly understand that he is gathering his pieces around the king to protect it,
more or less, since that is the sensible thing to do in the circumstances. In the
same way, we can often understand nature, more or less, without being able to see
what every little piece is doing, in terms of our understanding of the game.
At first the phenomena of nature were roughly divided into classes, like heat,
electricity, mechanics, magnetism, properties of substances, chemical phenomena,
light or optics, x-rays, nuclear physics, gravitation, meson phenomena, etc. However, the aim is to see complete nature as different aspects of one set of phenomena.
That is the problem in basic theoretical physics, today—to find the laws behind
experiment; to amalgamate these classes. Historically, we have always been able
to amalgamate them, but as time goes on new things are found. We were amalgamating very well, when all of a sudden x-rays were found. Then we amalgamated
some more, and mesons were found. Therefore, at any stage of the game, it always
looks rather messy. A great deal is amalgamated, but there are always many wires
or threads hanging out in all directions. That is the situation today, which we shall
try to describe.
Some historic examples of amalgamation are the following. First, take heat
and mechanics. When atoms are in motion, the more motion, the more heat the
system contains, and so heat and all temperature effects can be represented by the
laws of mechanics. Another tremendous amalgamation was the discovery of the
relation between electricity, magnetism, and light, which were found to be different aspects of the same thing, which we call today the electromagnetic field.
Another amalgamation is the unification of chemical phenomena, the various
properties of various substances, and the behavior of atomic particles, which is in
the quantum mechanics of chemistry.
The question is, of course, is it going to be possible to amalgamate everything,
and merely discover that this world represents different aspects of one thing?
Nobody knows. All we know is that as we go along, we find that we can amalgamate pieces, and then we find some pieces that do not fit, and we keep trying to
put the jigsaw puzzle together. Whether there are a finite number of pieces, and
whether there is even a border to the puzzle, is of course unknown. It will never
be known until we finish the picture, if ever. What we wish to do here is to see to
what extent this amalgamation process has gone on, and what the situation is at
present, in understanding basic phenomena in terms of the smallest set of principles.
To express it in a simple manner, what are things made of and how few elements
are there ?
2-2
2-2 Physics before 1920
It is a little difficult to begin at once with the present view, so we shall first
see how things looked in about 1920 and then take a few things out of that picture.
Before 1920, our world picture was something like this: The "stage" on which
the universe goes is the three-dimensional space of geometry, as described by
Euclid, and things change in a medium called time. The elements on the stage are
particles, for example the atoms, which have some properties. First, the property
of inertia: if a particle is moving it keeps on going in the same direction unless
forces act upon it. The second element, then, is forces, which were then thought
to be of two varieties: First, an enormously complicated, detailed kind of interaction force which held the various atoms in different combinations in a complicated way, which determined whether salt would dissolve faster or slower when
we raise the temperature. The other force that was known was a long-range
interaction—a smooth and quiet attraction—which varied inversely as the square
of the distance, and was called gravitation. This law was known and was very
simple. Why things remain in motion when they are moving, or why there is a
law of gravitation was, of course, not known.
A description of nature is what we are concerned with here. From this point
of view, then, a gas, and indeed all matter, is a myriad of moving particles. Thus
many of the things we saw while standing at the seashore can immediately be
connected. First the pressure: this comes from the collisions of the atoms with
the walls or whatever; the drift of the atoms, if they are all moving in one direction on the average, is wind; the random internal motions are the heat. There are
waves of excess density, where too many particles have collected, and so as they
Tush off they push up piles of particles farther out, and so on. This wave of excess
density is sound. It is a tremendous achievement to be able to understand so much.
Some of these things were described in the previous chapter.
What kinds of particles are there? There were considered to be 92 at that time:
92 different kinds of atoms were ultimately discovered. They had different names
associated with their chemical properties.
The next part of the problem was, what are the short-range forces ? Why
does carbon attract one oxygen or perhaps two oxygens, but not three oxygens?
What is the machinery of interaction between atoms? Is it gravitation? The answer
is no. Gravity is entirely too weak. But imagine a force analogous to gravity,
varying inversely with the square of the distance, but enormously more powerful
and having one difference. In gravity everything attracts everything else, but now
imagine that there are two kinds of "things," and that this new force (which is
the electrical force, of course) has the property that likes repel but unlikes attract.
The "thing" that carries this strong interaction is called charge.
Then what do we have? Suppose that we have two unlikes that attract each
other, a plus and a minus, and that they stick very close together. Suppose we
have another charge some distance away. Would it feel any attraction? It would
feel practically none, because if the first two are equal in size, the attraction for
the one and the repulsion for the other balance out. Therefore there is very little
force at any appreciable distance. On the other hand, if we get very close with the
extra charge, attraction arises, because the repulsion of likes and attraction of
unlikes will tend to bring unlikes closer together and push likes farther apart.
Then the repulsion will be less than the attraction. This is the reason why the atoms,
which are constituted out of plus and minus electric charges, feel very little force
when they are separated by appreciable distance (aside from gravity). When they
come close together, they can "see inside" each other and rearrange their charges,
with the result that they have a very strong interaction. The ultimate basis of
an interaction between the atoms is electrical. Since this force is so enormous, all
the plusses and all minuses will normally come together in as intimate a combination as they can. All things, even ourselves, are made of fine-grained, enormously
strongly interacting plus and minus parts, all neatly balanced out. Once in a while,
by accident, we may rub off a few minuses or a few plusses (usually it is easier
to rub off minuses), and in those circumstances we find the force of electricity
unbalanced, and we can then see the effects of these electrical attractions.
2-3
To give an idea of how much stronger electricity is than gravitation, consider
two grains of sand, a millimeter across, thirty meters apart. If the force between
them were not balanced, if everything attracted everything else instead of likes
repelling, so that there were no cancellation, how much force would there be?
There would be a force of three million tons between the two! You see, there is
very, very little excess or deficit of the number of negative or positive charges
necessary to produce appreciable electrical effects. This is, of course, the reason
why you cannot see the difference between an electrically charged or uncharged
thing—so few particles are involved that they hardly make a difference in the weight
or size of an object.
With this picture the atoms were easier to understand. They were thought to
have a "nucleus" at the center, which is positively electrically charged and very
massive, and the nucleus is surrounded by a certain number of "electrons" which
are very light and negatively charged. Now we go a little ahead in our story to
remark that in the nucleus itself there were found two kinds of particles, protons
and neutrons, almost of the same weight and very heavy. The protons are electrically charged and the neutrons are neutral. If we have an atom with six protons
inside its nucleus, and this is surrounded by six electrons (the negative particles in
the ordinary world of matter are all electrons, and these are very light compared
with the protons and neutrons which make nuclei), this would be atom number
six in the chemical table, and it is called carbon. Atom number eight is called
oxygen, etc., because the chemical properties depend upon the electrons on the
outside, and in fact only upon how many electrons there are. So the chemical
properties of a substance depend only on a number, the number of electrons. (The
whole list of elements of the chemists really could have been called 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
etc. Instead of saying "carbon," we could say "element six," meaning six electrons,
but of course, when the elements were first discovered, it was not known that they
could be numbered that way, and secondly, it would make everything look rather
complicated. It is better to have names and symbols for these things, rather than
to call everything by number.)
More was discovered about the electrical force. The natural interpretation
of electrical interaction is that two objects simply attract each other: plus against
minus. However, this was discovered to be an inadequate idea to represent it.
A more adequate representation of the situation is to say that the existence of the
positive charge, in some sense, distorts, or creates a "condition" in space, so that
when we put the negative charge in, it feels a force. This potentiality for producing a force is called an electric field. When we put an electron in an electric field,
we say it is "pulled." We then have two rules: (a) charges make a field, and
(b) charges in fields have forces on them and move. The reason for this will become clear when we discuss the following phenomena: If we were to charge a body,
say a comb, electrically, and then place a charged piece of paper at a distance and
move the comb back and forth, the paper will respond by always pointing to the
comb. If we shake it faster, it will be discovered that the paper is a little behind,
there is a delay in the action. (At the first stage, when we move the comb rather
slowly, we find a complication which is magnetism. Magnetic influences have to
do with charges in relative motion, so magnetic forces and electric forces can really
be attributed to one field, as two different aspects of exactly the same thing. A
changing electric field cannot exist without magnetism.) If we move the charged
paper farther out, the delay is greater. Then an interesting thing is observed.
Although the forces between two charged objects should go inversely as the
square of the distance, it is found, when we shake a charge, that the influence
extends very much farther out than we would guess at first sight. That is, the effect
falls off more slowly than the inverse square.
Here is an analogy: If we are in a pool of water and there is a floating cork
very close by, we can move it "directly" by pushing the water with another cork.
If you looked only at the two corks, all you would see would be that one moved
immediately in response to the motion of the other—there is some kind of "interaction" between them. Of course, what we really do is to disturb the water; the
water then disturbs the other cork. We could make up a "law" that if you pushed
2-4
the water a little bit, an object close by in the water would move. If it were farther
away, of course, the second cork would scarcely move, for we move the water
locally. On the other hand, if we jiggle the cork a new phenomenon is involved,
in which the motion of the water moves the water there, etc., and waves travel
away, so that by jiggling, there is an influence wry much farther out, an oscillatory
influence, that cannot be understood from the direct interaction. Therefore theidea of direct interaction must be replaced with the existence of the water, or-inthe electrical case, with what we call the electromagnetic field.
The electromagnetic field can carry waves; some of these waves are light,
others are used in radio broadcasts, but the general name is electromagnetic waves.
These oscillatory waves can have various frequencies. The only thing that is really
different from one wave to another is the frequency of oscillation. If we shake a
charge back and forth more and more rapidly, and look at the effects, we get a
whole series of different kinds of effects, which are all unified by specifying but
one number, the number of oscillations per second. The usual "pickup" that we
get from electric currents in the circuits in the walls of a building have a frequency
of about one hundred cycles per second. If we increase the frequency to 500 or
1000 kilocycles (1 kilocycle = 1000 cycles) per second, we are "on the air," for
this is the frequency range which is used for radio broadcasts. (Of course it has
nothing to do with the air! We can have radio broadcasts without any air.) If
we again increase the frequency, we come into the range that is used for FM and
TV. Going still further, we use certain short waves, for example for radar. Still
higher, and we do not need an instrument to "see" the stuff, we can see it with the
human eye. In the range of frequency from 5 X 1014 to 5 X 1015 cycles per
second our eyes would see the oscillation of the charged comb, if we could shake it
that fast, as red, blue, or violet light, depending on the frequency. Frequencies
below this range are called infrared, and above it, ultraviolet. The fact that we
can see in a particular frequency range makes that part of the electromagnetic
spectrum no more impressive than the other parts from a physicist's standpoint,
but from a human standpoint, of course, it is more interesting. If we go up even
higher in frequency, we get x-rays. X-rays are nothing but very high-frequency
light. If we go still higher, we get gamma rays. These two terms, x-rays and gamma
rays, are used almost synonymously. Usually electromagnetic rays coming from
nuclei are called gamma rays, while those of high energy from atoms are called
x-rays, but at the same frequency they are indistinguishable physically, no matter
what their source. If we go to still higher frequencies, say to 1024 cycles per
second, we find that we can make those waves artificially, for example with the
synchrotron here at Caltech. We can find electromagnetic waves with stupendously
high frequencies—with even a thousand times more rapid oscillation—in the waves
found in cosmic rays. These waves cannot be controlled by us.
Table 2-1
The Electromagnetic Spectrum
2-5
2-3 Quantum physics
Having described the idea of the electromagnetic field, and that this field
can carry waves, we soon learn that these waves actually behave in a strange way
which seems very unwavelike. At higher frequencies they behave much more like
particles! It is quantum mechanics, discovered just after 1920, which explains this
strange behavior. In the years before 1920, the picture of space as a three-dimensional space, and of time as a separate thing, was changed by Einstein, first into
a combination which we call space-time, and then still further into a curved
space-time to represent gravitation. So the "stage" is changed into space-time,
and gravitation is presumably a modification of space-time. Then it was also found
that the rules for the motions of particles were incorrect. The mechanical rules of
"inertia" and "forces" are wrong—Newton's laws are wrong—in the world of atoms.
Instead, it was discovered that things on a small scale behave nothing like things on
a large scale. That is what makes physics difficult—and very interesting. It is hard
because the way things behave on a small scale is so "unnatural"; we have no
direct experience with it. Here things behave like nothing we know of, so that it is
impossible to describe this behavior in any other than analytic ways. It is difficult,
and takes a lot of imagination.
Quantum mechanics has many aspects. In the first place, the idea that a
particle has a definite location and a definite speed is no longer allowed; that is
wrong. To give an example of how wrong classical physics is, there is a rule in
quantum mechanics that says that one cannot know both where something is and
how fast it is moving. The uncertainty of the momentum and the uncertainty of
the position are complementary, and the product of the two is constant. We can
write the law like this: Dx Dp ³ h/2p, but we shall explain it in more detail later.
This rule is the explanation of a very mysterious paradox: if the atoms are made
out of plus and minus charges, why don't the minus charges simply sit on top of
the plus charges (they attract each other) and get so close as to completely cancel
them out? Why are atoms so big? Why is the nucleus at the center with the
electrons around it? It was first thought that this was because the nucleus was so
big; but no, the nucleus is very small. An atom has a diameter of about 10-8 cm.
The nucleus has a diameter of about 10-13 cm. If we had an atom and wished to
see the nucleus, we would have to magnify it until the whole atom was the size of
a large room, and then the nucleus would be a bare speck which you could just
about make out with the eye, but very nearly all the weight of the atom is in that
infinitesimal nucleus. What keeps the electrons from simply falling in? This
principle: If they were in the nucleus, we would know their position precisely, and
the uncertainty principle would then require that they have a very large (but
uncertain) momentum, i.e., a very large kinetic energy. With this energy they
would break away from the nucleus. They make a compromise: they leave themselves a little room for this uncertainty and then jiggle with a certain amount of
minimum motion in accordance with this rule. (Remember that when a crystal
is cooled to absolute zero, we said that the atoms do not stop moving, they still
jiggle. Why? If they stopped moving, we would know where they were and that
they had zero motion, and that is against the uncertainty principle. We cannot
know where they are and how fast they are moving, so they must be continually
wiggling in there!)
Another most interesting change in the ideas and philosophy of science
brought about by quantum mechanics is this: it is not possible to predict exactly
what will happen in any circumstance. For example, it is possible to arrange an
atom which is ready to emit light, and we can measure when it has emitted light
by picking up a photon particle, which we shall describe shortly. We cannot,
however, predict when it is going to emit the light or, with several atoms, which
one is going to. You may say that this is because there are some internal "wheels"
which we have not looked at closely enough. No, there are no internal wheels;
nature, as we understand it today, behaves in such a way that it is fundamentally
impossible to make a precise prediction of exactly what will happen in a given
experiment. This is a horrible thing; in fact, philosophers have said before that
one of the fundamental requisites of science is that whenever you set up the same
2-6
conditions, the same thing must happen. This is simply not true, it is not a fundamental condition of science. The fact is that the same thing does not happen,
that we can find only an average, statistically, as to what happens. Nevertheless,
science has not completely collapsed. Philosophers, incidentally, say a great deal
about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can
see, rather naive, and probably wrong. For example, some philosopher or other
said it is fundamental to the scientific effort that if an experiment is performed in,
say, Stockholm, and then the same experiment is done in, say, Quito, the same
results must occur. That is quite false. It is not necessary that science do that;
it may be a fact of experience, but it is not necessary. For example, if one of the
experiments is to look out at the sky and see the aurora borealis in Stockholm,
you do not see it in Quito; that is a different phenomenon. "But," you say, "that
is something that has to do with the outside; can you close yourself up in a box
in Stockholm and pull down the shade and get any difference?" Surely. If we take
a pendulum on a universal joint, and pull it out and let go, then the pendulum
will swing almost in a plane, but not quite. Slowly the plane keeps changing in
Stockholm, but not in Quito. The blinds are down, too. The fact that this happened
does not bring on the destruction of science. What is the fundamental hypothesis of
science, the fundamental philosophy? We stated it in the first chapter: the sole
test of the validity of any idea is experiment. If it turns out that most experiments
work out the same in Quito as they do in Stockholm, then those "most experiments" will be used to formulate some general law, and those experiments which
do not come out the same we will say were a result of the environment near
Stockholm. We will invent some way to summarize the results of the experiment,
and we do not have to be told ahead of time what this way will look like. If we
are told that the same experiment will always produce the same result, that is all
very well, but if when we try it, it does not, then it does not. We just have to take
what we see, and then formulate all the rest of our ideas in terms of our actual
experience.
Returning again to quantum mechanics and fundamental physics, we cannot
go into details of the quantum-mechanical principles at this time, of course, because these are rather difficult to understand. We shall assume that they are there,
and go on to describe what some of the consequences are. One of the consequences
is that things which we used to consider as waves also behave like particles, and
particles behave like waves; in fact everything behaves the same way. There is no
distinction between a wave and a particle. So quantum mechanics unifies the idea
of the field and its waves, and the particles, all into one. Now it is true that when
the frequency is low, the field aspect of the phenomenon is more evident, or more
useful as an approximate description in terms of everyday experiences. But as the
frequency increases, the particle aspects of the phenomenon become more evident
with the equipment with which we usually make the measurements. In fact, although we mentioned many frequencies, no phenomenon directly involving a frequency has yet been detected above approximately 1012 cycles per second. We
only deduce the higher frequencies from the energy of the particles, by a rule which
assumes that the particle-wave idea of quantum mechanics is valid.
Thus we have a new view of electromagnetic interaction. We have a new kind
of particle to add to the electron, the proton, and the neutron. That new particle
is called a photon. The new view of the interaction of electrons and protons that
is electromagnetic theory, but with everything quantum-mechanically correct, is
called quantum electrodynamics. This fundamental theory of the interaction of
light and matter, or electric field and charges, is our greatest success so far in
physics. In this one theory we have the basic rules for all ordinary phenomena
except for gravitation and nuclear processes. For example, out of quantum electrodynamics come all known electrical, mechanical, and chemical laws: the laws for
the collision of billiard balls, the motions of wires in magnetic fields, the specific
heat of carbon monoxide, the color of neon signs, the density of salt, and the
reactions of hydrogen and oxygen to make water are all consequences of this one
law. All these details can be worked out if the situation is simple enough for us to
make an approximation, which is almost never, but often we can understand more
2-7
or less what is happening. At the present time no exceptions are found to the
quantum-electrodynamic laws outside the nucleus, and there we do not know
whether there is an exception because we simply do not know what is going on in
the nucleus.
In principle, then, quantum electrodynamics is the theory of all chemistry,
and of life, if life is ultimately reduced to chemistry and therefore just to physics
because chemistry is already reduced (the part of physics which is involved in
chemistry being already known). Furthermore, the same quantum electrodynamics,
this great thing, predicts a lot of new things. In the first place, it tells the properties
of very high-energy photons, gamma rays, etc. It predicted another very remarkable thing: besides the electron, there should be another particle of the
same mass, but of opposite charge, called a positron, and these two, coming together, could annihilate each other with the emission of light or gamma rays.
(After all, light and gamma rays are all the same, they are just different points on
a frequency scale.) The generalization of this, that for each particle there is an
antiparticle, turns out to be true. In the case of electrons, the antiparticle has
another name—it is called a positron, but for most other particles, it is called antiso-and-so, like antiproton or antineutron. In quantum electrodynamics, two
numbers are put in and most of the other numbers in the world are supposed to
come out. The two numbers that are put in are called the mass of the electron and
the charge of the electron. Actually, that is not quite true, for we have a whole
set of numbers for chemistry which tells how heavy the nuclei are. That leads us
to the next part.
2-4 Nuclei and particles
What are the nuclei made of, and how are they held together? It is found
that the nuclei are held together by enormous forces. When these are released,
the energy released is tremendous compared with chemical energy, in the same
ratio as the atomic bomb explosion is to a TNT explosion, because, of course,
the atomic bomb has to do with changes inside the nucleus, while the explosion
of TNT has to do with the changes of the electrons on the outside of the atoms.
The question is, what are the forces which hold the protons and neutrons together
in the nucleus? Just as the electrical interaction can be connected to a particle,
a photon, Yukawa suggested that the forces between neutrons and protons also
have a field of some kind, and that when this field jiggles it behaves like a particle.
Thus there could be some other particles in the world besides protons and neutrons,
and he was able to deduce the properties of these particles from the already known
characteristics of nuclear forces. For example, he predicted they should have a
mass of two or three hundred times that of an electron; and lo and behold, in
cosmic rays there was discovered a particle of the right mass! But it later turned
out to be the wrong particle. It was called a m-meson, or muon.
However, a little while later, in 1947 or 1948, another particle was found,
the p-meson, or pion, which satisfied Yukawa's criterion. Besides the proton and
the neutron, then, in order to get nuclear forces we must add the pion. Now,
you say, "Oh great!, with this theory we make quantum nucleodynamics using
the pions just like Yukawa wanted to do, and see if it works, and everything will
be explained." Bad luck. It turns out that the calculations that are involved in
this theory are so difficult that no one has ever been able to figure out what the
consequences of the theory are, or to check it against experiment, and this has
been going on now for almost twenty years!
So we are stuck with a theory, and we do not know whether it is right or wrong,
but we do know that it is a little wrong, or at least incomplete. While we have
been dawdling around theoretically, trying to calculate the consequences of this
theory, the experimentalists have been discovering some things. For example,
they had already discovered this m-meson or muon, and we do not yet know where
it fits. Also, in cosmic rays, a large number of other "extra" particles were found.
It turns out that today we have approximately thirty particles, and it is very
difficult to understand the relationships of all these particles, and what nature
2-8
, wants them for, or what the connections are from one to another. We do not today
understand these various particles as different aspects of the same thing, and the
fact that we have so many unconnected particles is a representation of the fact
that we have so much unconnected information without a good theory. After
the great successes of quantum electrodynamics, there is a certain amount of
knowledge of nuclear physics which is rough knowledge, sort of half experience
and half theory, assuming a type of force between protons and neutrons and seeing what will happen, but not really understanding where the force comes from.
Aside from that, we have made very little progress. We have collected an enormous number of chemical elements. In the chemical case, there suddenly appeared
a relationship among these elements which was unexpected, and which is embodied
in the periodic table of Mendeleev. For example, sodium and potassium are
about the same in their chemical properties and are found in the same column
in the Mendeleev chart. We have been seeking a Mendeleev-type chart for the
new particles. One such chart of the new particles was made independently by
Gell-Mann in the U.S.A. and Nishijima in Japan. The basis of their classification
is a new number, like the electric charge, which can be assigned to each particle,
called its "strangeness," S. This number is conserved, like the electric charge, in
reactions which take place by nuclear forces.
In Table 2-2 are listed all the particles. We cannot discuss them much at
this stage, but the table will at least show you how much we do not know. Underneath each particle its mass is given in a certain unit, called the Mev. One Mev
is equal to 1.782 X 10~27 gram. The reason this unit was chosen is historical,
and we shall not go into it now. More massive particles are put higher up on the
chart; we see that a neutron and a proton have almost the same mass. In vertical
columns we have put the particles with the same electrical charge, all neutral
objects in one column, all positively charged ones to the right of this one, and all
negatively charged objects to the left.
Particles are shown with a solid line and "resonances" with a dashed one.
Several particles have been omitted from the table. These include the important
zero-mass, zero-charge particles, the photon and the graviton, which do not fall into
the baryon-meson-lepton classification scheme, and also some of the newer
resonances (K*, <p, ri). The antiparticles of the mesons are listed in the table, but
the antiparticles of the leptons and baryons would have to be listed in another
table which would look exactly like this one reflected on the zero-charge column.
Although all of the particles except the electron, neutrino, photon, graviton, and
proton are unstable, decay products have been shown only for the resonances.
Strangeness assignments are not applicable for leptons, since they do not interact
strongly with nuclei.
All particles which are together with the neutrons and protons are called
baryons, and the following ones exist: There is a "lambda," with a mass of 1154
Mev, and three others, called sigmas, minus, neutral, and plus, with several masses
almost the same. There are groups or multiplets with almost the same mass, within
one or two percent. Each particle in a multiple! has the same strangeness. The
first multiple! is the proton-neutron doublet, and then there is a singlet (the
lambda) then the sigma triplet, and finally the xi doublet. Very recently, in 1961,
even a few more particles were found. Or are they particles? They live so short a
time, they disintegrate almost instantaneously, as soon as they are formed, that
we do not know whether they should be considered as new particles, or some kind
of "resonance" interaction of a certain definite energy between the A and T products
into which they disintegrate.
In addition to the baryons the other particles which are involved in the nuclear
interaction are called mesons. There are first the pions, which come in three varieties, positive, negative, and neutral; they form another multiplet. We have also
found some new things called A'-mesons, and they occur as a doublet, K+ and
K°. Also, every particle has its antiparticle, unless a particle is its own antiparticle.
For example, the ir~ and the 7T4' are antiparticles, but the TT" is its own antiparticle.
The K~ and ^+ are antiparticles, and the K° and K°. In addition, in 1961 we also
found some more mesons or maybe mesons which disintegrate almost immediately.
2-9
Table 2-2.
Elementary Particles
A thing called w which goes into three pions has a mass 780 on this scale, and
somewhat less certain is an object which disintegrates into two pions. These particles, called mesons and baryons, and the antiparticles of the mesons are on the
same chart, but the antiparticles of the baryons must be put on another chart,
"reflected" through the charge-zero column.
Just as Mendeleev's chart was very good, except for the fact that there were
a number of rare earth elements which were hanging out loose from it, so we have
a number of things hanging out loose from this chart—particles which do not
interact strongly in nuclei, have nothing to do with a nuclear interaction, and do
not have a strong interaction (I mean the powerful kind of interaction of nuclear
energy). These are called leptons, and they are the following: there is the electron,
which has a very small mass on this scale, only 0.510 Mev. Then there is that
other, the ^-meson, the muon, which has a mass much higher, 206 times as heavy
as an electron. So far as we can tell, by all experiments so far, the difference
between the electron and the muon is nothing but the mass. Everything works
exactly the same for the muon as for the electron, except that one is heavier than
the other. Why is there another one heavier; what is the use for it? We do not
know. In addition, there is a lepton which is neutral, called a neutrino, and this
particle has zero mass. In fact, it is now known that there are two different kinds
of neutrinos, one related to electrons and the other related to muons.
Finally, we have two other particles which do not interact strongly with the
nuclear ones: one is a photon, and perhaps, if the field of gravity also has a quantum-mechanical analog (a quantum theory of gravitation has not yet been worked
out), then there will be a particle, a graviton, which will have zero mass.
What is this "zero mass"? The masses given here are the masses of the
particles at rest. The fact that a particle has zero mass means, in a way, that it
cannot be at rest. A photon is never at rest, it is always moving at 186,000 miles a
second. We will understand more what mass means when we understand the theory
of relativity, which will come in due time.
Thus we are confronted with a large number of particles, which together seem
to be the fundamental constituents of matter. Fortunately, these particles are
not all different in their interactions with one another. In fact, there seem to be
just four kinds of interaction between particles which, in the order of decreasing
strength, are the nuclear force, electrical interactions, the beta-decay interaction, <
and gravity. The photon is coupled to all charged particles and the strength of
the interaction is measured by some number, which is 1/137. The detailed law
of this coupling is known, that is quantum electrodynamics. • Gravity is coupled
to all energy, but its coupling is extremely weak, much weaker than that of electricity. This law is also known. Then there are the so-called weak decays—
beta decay, which causes the neutron to disintegrate into proton, electron, and
neutrino, relatively slowly. This law is only partly known. The so-called strong
interaction, the meson-baryon interaction, has a strength of 1 in this scale, and the
law is completely unknown, although there are a number of known rules, such
as that the number of baryons does not change in any reaction.
Table 2-3. Elementary Interactions
Coupling
Strength*
Photon to charged particles
~10~2
Gravity to all energy
40
-^lO"
5
Weak decays
~10~
Mesons to baryons
~1
Law
Law known
Law known
Law partly known
Law unknown (some rules known)
* The "strength" is a dimensionless measure of the coupling constant involved in each
interaction (~ means "approximately").
2-10
This then, is the horrible condition of our physics today. To summarize it,
I would say this: outside the nucleus, we seem to know all; inside it, quantum
mechanics is valid—the principles of quantum mechanics have not been found to
fail. The stage on which we put all of our knowledge, we would say, is relativistic
space-time; perhaps gravity is involved in space-time. We do not know how the
universe got started, and we have never made experiments which check our ideas
of space and time accurately, below some tiny distance, so we only know that
our ideas work above that distance. We should also add that the rules of the game
are the quantum-mechanical principles, and those principles apply, so far as we
can tell, to the new particles as well as to the old. The origin of the forces in
nuclei leads us to new particles, but unfortunately they appear in great profusion
and we lack a complete understanding of their interrelationship, although we
already know that there are some very surprising relationships among them.
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
2-11
3
The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences
3-1 Introduction
Physics is the most fundamental and all-inclusive of the sciences, and has
had a profound effect on all scientific development. In fact, physics is the presentday equivalent of what used to be called natural philosophy, from which most of
our modern sciences arose. Students of many fields find themselves studying
physics because of the basic role it plays in all phenomena. In this chapter we
shall try to explain what the fundamental problems in the other sciences are,
but of course it is impossible in so small a space really to deal with the complex,
subtle, beautiful matters in these other fields. Lack of space also prevents our
discussing the relation of physics to engineering, industry, society, and war, or
even the most remarkable relationship between mathematics and physics. (Mathematics is not a science from our point of view, in the sense that it is not a natural
science. The test of its validity is not experiment.) We must, incidentally, make it
clear from the beginning that if a thing is not a science, it is not necessarily bad.
For example, love is not a science. So, if something is said not to be a science,
it does not mean that there is something wrong with it; it just means that it is not
a science.
3-2 Chemistry
The science which is perhaps the most deeply affected by physics is chemistry.
Historically, the early days of chemistry dealt almost entirely with what we now call
inorganic chemistry, the chemistry of substances which are not associated with
living things. Considerable analysis was required to discover the existence of the
many elements and their relationships—how they make the various relatively
simple compounds found in rocks, earth, etc. This early chemistry was very
important for physics. The interaction between the two sciences was very great
because the theory of atoms was substantiated to a large extent by experiments
in chemistry. The theory of chemistry, i.e., of the reactions themselves, was
summarized to a large extent in the periodic chart of Mendeleev, which brings out
many strange relationships among the various elements, and it was the collection
of rules as to which substance is combined with which, and how, that constituted
inorganic chemistry. All these rules were ultimately explained in principle by
quantum mechanics, so that theoretical chemistry is in fact physics. On the
other hand, it must be emphasized that this explanation is in principle. We have
already discussed the difference between knowing the rules of the game of chess,
and being able to play. So it is that we may know the rules, but we cannot play
very well. It turns out to be very difficult to predict precisely what will happen in
a given chemical reaction; nevertheless, the deepest part of theoretical chemistry
must end up in quantum mechanics.
There is also a branch of physics and chemistry which was developed by both
sciences together, and which is extremely important. This is the method of
statistics applied in a situation in which there are mechanical laws, which is aptly
called statistical mechanics. In any chemical situation a large number of atoms are
involved, and we have seen that the atoms are all jiggling around in a very random
and complicated way. If we could analyze each collision, and be able to follow
in detail the motion of each molecule, we might hope to figure out what would
happen, but the many numbers needed to keep track of all these molecules exceeds so enormously the capacity of any computer, and certainly the capacity of
3-1
3-1 Introduction
3-2 Chemistry
3-3 Biology
3-4 Astronomy
3-5 Geology
3-6 Psychology
3-7 How did it get that way?
the mind, that it was important to develop a method for dealing with such complicated situations. Statistical mechanics, then, is the science of the phenomena
of heat, or thermodynamics. Inorganic chemistry is, as a science, now reduced
essentially to what are called physical chemistry and quantum chemistry; physical
chemistry to study the rates at which reactions occur and what is happening in
detail (How do the molecules hit? Which pieces fly off first?, etc.), and quantum
chemistry to help us understand what happens in terms of the physical laws.
The other branch of chemistry is organic chemistry, the chemistry of the
substances which are associated with living things. For a time it was believed
that the substances which are associated with living things were so marvelous
that they could not be made by hand, from inorganic materials. This is not at
all true—they are just the same as the substances made in inorganic chemistry,
but more complicated arrangements of atoms are involved. Organic chemistry
obviously has a very close relationship to the biology which supplies its substances,
and to industry, and furthermore, much physical chemistry and quantum mechanics
can be applied to organic as well as to inorganic compounds. However, the main
problems of organic chemistry are not in these aspects, but rather in the analysis
and synthesis of the substances which are formed in biological systems, in living
things. This leads imperceptibly, in steps, toward biochemistry, and then into
biology itself, or molecular biology.
3-3 Biology
Thus we come to the science of biology, which is the study of living things.
In the early days of biology, the biologists had to deal with the purely descriptive
problem of finding out what living things there were, and so they just had to
count such things as the hairs of the limbs of fleas. After these matters were worked
out with a great deal of interest, the biologists went into the machinery inside the
living bodies, first from a gross standpoint, naturally, because it takes some effort
to get into the finer details.
There was an interesting early relationship between physics and biology in
which biology helped physics in the discovery of the conservation of energy, which
was first demonstrated by Mayer in connection with the amount of heat taken in
and given out by a living creature.
If we look at the processes of biology of living animals more closely, we see
many physical phenomena: the circulation of blood, pumps, pressure, etc. There
are nerves: we know what is happening when we step on a sharp stone, and that
somehow or other the information goes from the leg up. It is interesting how that
happens. In their study of nerves, the biologists have come to the conclusion that
nerves are very fine tubes with a complex wall which is very thin; through this
wall the cell pumps ions, so that there are positive ions on the outside and negative ions on the inside, like a capacitor. Now this membrane has an interesting
property; if it "discharges" in one place, i.e., if some of the ions were able to move
through one place, so that the electric voltage is reduced there, that electrical
influence makes itself felt on the ions in the neighborhood, and it affects the
membrane in such a way that it lets the ions through at neighboring points also.
This in turn affects it farther along, etc., and so there is a wave of "penetrability"
of the membrane which runs down the fiber when it is "excited" at one end by
stepping on the sharp stone. This wave is somewhat analogous to a long sequence
of vertical dominoes; if the end one is pushed over, that one pushes the next,
etc. Of course this will transmit only one message unless the dominoes are set
up again; and similarly in the nerve cell, there are processes which pump the ions
slowly out again, to get the nerve ready for the next impulse. So it is that we know
what we are doing (or at least where we are). Of course the electrical effects
associated with this nerve impulse can be picked up with electrical instruments,
and because there are electrical effects, obviously the physics of electrical effects
has had a great deal of influence on understanding the phenomenon.
The opposite effect is that, from somewhere in the brain, a message is sent
out along a nerve. What happens at the end of the nerve? There the nerve branches
3-2
out into fine little things, connected to a structure near a muscle, called an endplate. For reasons which are not exactly understood, when the impulse reaches
the end of the nerve, little packets of a chemical called acetylcholine are shot off
(five or ten molecules at a time) and they affect the muscle fiber and make it contract—how simple! What makes a muscle contract? A muscle is a very large number of fibers close together, containing two different substances, myosin and
actomyosin, but the machinery by which the chemical reaction induced by acetylcholine can modify the dimensions of the molecule is not yet known. Thus the
fundamental processes in the muscle that make mechanical motions are not known.
Biology is such an enormously wide field that there are hosts of other problems
that we cannot mention at all—problems on how vision works (what the light does
in the eye), how hearing works, etc. (The way in which thinking works we shall
discuss later under psychology.) Now, these things concerning biology which
we have just discussed are, from a biological standpoint, really not fundamental,
at the bottom of life, in the sense that even if we understood them we still would
not understand life itself. To illustrate: the men who study nerves feel their work
is very important, because after all you cannot have animals without nerves.
But you can have life without nerves. Plants have neither nerves nor muscles,
but they are working, they are alive, just the same. So for the fundamental problems of biology we must look deeper; when we do, we discover that all living
things have a great many characteristics in common. The most common feature
is that they are made of cells, within each of which is complex machinery for doing
things chemically. In plant cells, for example, there is machinery for picking up
light and generating sucrose, which is consumed in the dark to keep the plant
alive. When the plant is eaten the sucrose itself generates in the animal a series
of chemical reactions very closely related to photosynthesis (and its opposite
effect in the dark) in plants.
In the cells of living systems there are many elaborate chemical reactions,
in which one compound is changed into another and another. To give some impression of the enormous efforts that have gone into the study of biochemistry,
the chart in Fig. 3-1 summarizes our knowledge to date on just one small part of
the many series of reactions which occur in cells, perhaps a percent or so of it.
Here we see a whole series of molecules which change from one to another
in a sequence or cycle of rather small steps. It is called the Krebs cycle, the respiratory cycle. Each of the chemicals and each of the steps is fairly simple, in terms
of what change is made in the molecule, but—and this is a centrally important
discovery in biochemistry—these changes are relatively difficult to accomplish in a
laboratory. If we have one substance and another very similar substance, the one
does not just turn into the other, because the two forms are usually separated by
3-3
an energy barrier or "hill." Consider this analogy: If we wanted to take an object
from one place to another, at the same level but on the other side of a hill, we could
push it over the top, but to do so requires the addition of some energy. Thus
most chemical reactions do not occur, because there is what is called an activation energy in the way. In order to add an extra atom to our chemical requires
that we get it close enough that some rearrangement can occur; then it will stick.
But if we cannot give it enough energy to get it close enough, it will not go to completion, it will just go part way up the "hill" and back down again. However,
if we could literally take the molecules in our hands and push and pull the atoms
around in such a way as to open a hole to let the new atom in, and then let it snap
back, we would have found another way, around the hill, which would not require
extra energy, and the reaction would go easily. Now there actually are, in the cells,
very large molecules, much larger than the ones whose changes we have been describing, which in some complicated way hold the smaller molecules just right, so
that the reaction can occur easily. These very large and complicated things are
called enzymes. (They were first called ferments, because they were originally
discovered in the fermentation of sugar. In fact, some of the first reactions in
the cycle were discovered there.) In the presence of an enzyme the reaction will go.
An enzyme is made of another substance called protein. Enzymes are very
big and complicated, and each one is different, each being built to control a certain
special reaction. The names of the enzymes are written in Fig. 3-1 at each reaction.
(Sometimes the same enzyme may control two reactions.) We emphasize that the
enzymes themselves are not involved in the reaction directly. They do not change;
they merely let an atom go from one place to another. Having done so, the enzyme
is ready to do it to the next molecule, like a machine in a factory. Of course, there
must be a supply of certain atoms and a way of disposing of other atoms. Take
hydrogen, for example: there are enzymes which have special units on them which
carry the hydrogen for all chemical reactions. For example, there are three or four
hydrogen-reducing enzymes which are used all over our cycle in different places.
It is interesting that the machinery which liberates some hydrogen at one place
will take that hydrogen and use it somewhere else.
The most important feature of the cycle of Fig. 3-1 is the transformation
from GDP to GTP (guanadine-di-phosphate to guanadine-tri-phosphate) because
the one substance has much more energy in it than the other. Just as there is a
"box" in certain enzymes for carrying hydrogen atoms around, there are special
energy-carrying "boxes" which involve the triphosphate group. So, GTP has more
energy than GDP and if the cycle is going one way, we are producing molecules
which have extra energy and which can go drive some other cycle which requires
energy, for example the contraction of muscle. The muscle will not contract
unless there is GTP. We can take muscle fiber, put it in water, and add GTP,
and the fibers contract, changing GTP to GDP if the right enzymes are present.
So the real system is in the GDP-GTP transformation; in the dark the GTP
which has been stored up during the day is used to run the whole cycle around the
other way. An enzyme you see, does not care in which direction the reaction goes,
for if it did it would violate one of the laws of physics.
Physics is of great importance in biology and other sciences for still another
reason, that has to do with experimental techniques. In fact, if it were not for the
great development of experimental physics, these biochemistry charts would not
be known today. The reason is that the most useful tool of all for analyzing this
fantastically complex system is to label the atoms which are used in the reactions.
Thus, if we could introduce into the cycle some carbon dioxide which has a
"green mark" on it, and then measure after three seconds where the green mark
is, and again measure after ten seconds, etc., we could trace out the course of the
reactions. What are the "green marks"? They are different isotopes. We recall
that the chemical properties of atoms are determined by the number of electrons,
not by the mass of the nucleus. But there can be, for example in carbon, six
neutrons or seven neutrons, together with the six protons which all carbon nuclei
have. Chemically, the two atoms C 12 and C 13 are the same, but they differ in
weight and they have different nuclear properties, and so they are distinguishable.
3-4
By using these isotopes of different weights, or even radioactive isotopes like C14,
which provide a more sensitive means for tracing very small quantities, it is possible to trace the reactions.
Now, we return to the description of enzymes and proteins. All proteins are
not enzymes, but all enzymes are proteins. There are many proteins, such as the
proteins in muscle, the structural proteins which are, for example, in cartilage and
hair, skin, etc., that are not themselves enzymes. However, proteins are a very
characteristic substance of life: first of all they make up all the enzymes, and
second, they make up much of the rest of living material. Proteins have a very
interesting and simple structure. They are a series, or chain, of different ammo
acids. There are twenty different amino acids, and they all can combine with
each other to form chains in which the backbone is CO-NH, etc. Proteins are
nothing but chains of various ones of these twenty amino acids. Each of the amino
acids probably serves some special purpose. Some, for example, have a sulphur
atom at a certain place; when two sulphur atoms are in the same protein, they
form a bond, that is, they tie the chain together at two points and form a loop.
Another has extra oxygen atoms which make it an acidic substance, another has
a basic characteristic. Some of them have big groups hanging out to one side, so that they take up a lot of space. One of the amino acids, called prolene, is not
really an amino acid, but imino acid. There is a slight difference, with the result
that when prolene is in the chain, there is a kink in the chain. If we wished to
manufacture a particular protein, we would give these instructions: put one of
those sulphur hooks here; next, add something to take up space; then attach something to put a kink in the chain. In this way, we will get a complicated-looking
chain, hooked together and having some complex structure; this is presumably
just the manner in which all the various enzymes are made. One of the great triumphs in recent times (since 1960), was at last to discover the exact spatial atomic
arrangement of certain proteins, which involve some fifty-six or sixty amino acids
in a row. Over a thousand atoms (more nearly two thousand, if we count the
hydrogen atoms) have been located in a complex pattern in two proteins. The
first was hemoglobin. One of the sad aspects of this discovery is that we cannot see
anything from the pattern; we do not understand why it works the way it does.
Of course, that is the next problem to be attacked.
Another problem is how do the enzymes know what to be? A red-eyed fly
makes a red-eyed fly baby, and so the information for the whole pattern of enzymes
to make red pigment must be passed from one fly to the next. This is done by a
substance in the nucleus of the cell, not a protein, called DNA (short for desoxyribose nucleic acid). This is the key substance which is passed from one cell
to another (for instance, sperm cells consist mostly of DNA) and carries the
information as to how to make the enzymes. DNA is the "blueprint." What does
the blueprint look like and how does it work? First, the blueprint must be able
to reproduce itself. Secondly, it must be able to instruct the protein. Concerning
the reproduction, we might think that this proceeds like cell reproduction. Cells
simply grow bigger and then divide in half. Must it be thus with DNA molecules,
then, that they too grow bigger and divide in half? Every atom certainly does not
grow bigger and divide in half! No, it is impossible to reproduce a molecule
except by some more clever way.
The structure of the substance DNA was studied for a long time, first chemically to find the composition, and then with x-rays to find the pattern in space.
The result was the following remarkable discovery: The DNA molecule is a pair
of chains, twisted upon each other. The backbone of each of these chains, which
are analogous to the chains of proteins but chemically quite different, is a series
of sugar and phosphate groups, as shown in Fig. 3-2. Now we see how the chain
can contain instructions, for if we could split this chain down the middle, we would
have a series BAADC . . . and every living thing could have a different series.
Thus perhaps, in some way, the specific instructions for the manufacture of proteins are contained in the specific series of the DNA.
Attached to each sugar along the line, and linking the two chains together, are
certain pairs of cross-links. However, they are not all of the same kind; there are
3-5
four kinds, called adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, but let us call them
A, B, C, and D. The interesting thing is that only certain pairs can sit opposite
each other, for example A with B and C with D. These pairs are put on the two
chains in such a way that they "fit together," and have a strong energy of interaction. However, C will not fit with A, and B will not fit with C; they will only fit
in pairs, A against B and C against D. Therefore if one is C, the other must be
D, etc. Whatever the letters may be in one chain, each one must have its specific
complementary letter on the other chain.
What then about reproduction? Suppose we split this chain in two. How
can we make another one just like it? If, in the substances of the cells, there is a
manufacturing department which brings up phosphate, sugar, and A, B, C, D
units not connected in a chain, the only ones which will attach to our split chain
will be the correct ones, the complements of BAADC . . ., namely, ABBCD ...
Thus what happens is that the chain splits down the middle during cell division,
one half ultimately to go with one cell, the other half to end up in the other cell;
when separated, a new complementary chain is made by each half-chain.
Next comes the question, precisely how does the order of the A, B, C, D units
determine the arrangement of the amino acids in the protein? This is the central
unsolved problem in biology today. The first clues, or pieces of information,
however, are these: There are in the cell tiny particles called microsomes, and
it is now known that that is the place where proteins are made. But the microsomes are not in the nucleus, where the DNA and its instructions are. Something
seems to be the matter. However, it is also known that little molecule pieces come
off the DNA—not as long as the big DNA molecule that carries all the information itself, but like a small section of it. This is called RNA, but that is not essential.
It is a kind of copy of the DNA, a short copy. The RNA, which somehow carries
a message as to what kind of protein to make goes over to the microsome; that
is known. When it gets there, protein is synthesized at the microsome. That is
also known. However, the details of how the amino acids come in and are arranged
in accordance with a code that is on the RNA are, as yet, still unknown. We do
not know how to read it. If we knew, for example, the "lineup" A, B, C, C, A,
we could not tell you what protein is to be made.
Certainly no subject or field is making more progress on so many fronts at
the present moment, than biology, and if we were to name the most powerful
assumption of all, which leads one on and on in an attempt to understand life,
it is that all things are made of atoms, and that everything that living things do can
be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms.
3-4 Astronomy
In this rapid-fire explanation of the whole world, we must now turn to
astronomy. Astronomy is older than physics. In fact, it got physics started by
showing the beautiful simplicity of the motion of the stars and planets, the understanding of which was the beginning of physics. But the most remarkable discovery
in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on
the earth* How was this done? Atoms liberate light which has definite fre* How I'm rushing through this! How much each sentence in this brief story contains.
"The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like
this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere
globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and
feel them. But do I see less or more ? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast
pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten
star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all
apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What
is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why ? It does not do harm to the mystery to know
a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!
Why do the poets of the present not speak of it ? What men are poets who can speak of
Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and
ammonia must be silent?
3-6
quencies, something like the timbre of a musical instrument, which has definite
pitches or frequencies of sound. When we are listening to several different tones
we can tell them apart, but when we look with our eyes at a mixture of colors we
cannot tell the parts from which it was made, because the eye is nowhere near as
discerning as the ear in this connection. However, with a spectroscope we can
analyze the frequencies of the light waves and in this way we can see the very tunes
of the atoms that are in the different stars. As a matter of fact, two of the chemical
elements were discovered on a star before they were discovered on the earth.
Helium was discovered on the sun, whence its name, and technetium was discovered in certain cool stars. This, of course, permits us to make headway in
understanding the stars, because they are made of the same kinds of atoms which
are on the earth. Now we know a great deal about the atoms, especially concerning their behavior under conditions of high temperature but not very great
density, so that we can analyze by statistical mechanics the behavior of the stellar
substance. Even though we cannot reproduce the conditions on the earth, using
the basic physical laws we often can tell precisely, or very closely, what will happen.
So it is that physics aids astronomy. Strange as it may seem, we understand the
distribution of matter in the interior of the sun far better than we understand the
interior of the earth. What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might
guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope,
because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.
One of the most impressive discoveries was the origin of the energy of the
stars, that makes them continue to burn. One of the men who discovered this was
out with his girl friend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be
going on in the stars in order to make them shine. She said "Look at how pretty
the stars shine!" He said "Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world
who knows why they shine." She merely laughed at him. She was not impressed
with being out with the only man who, at that moment, knew why stars shine.
Well, it is sad to be alone, but that is the way it is in this world.
It is the nuclear "burning" of hydrogen which supplies the energy of the sun;
the hydrogen is converted into helium. Furthermore, ultimately, the manufacture
of various chemical elements proceeds in the centers of the stars, from hydrogen.
The stuff of which we are made, was "cooked" once, in a star, and spit out. How
do we know? Because there is a clue. The proportion of the different isotopes—
how much C 12 , how much C13, etc., is something which is never changed by
chemical reactions, because the chemical reactions are so much the same for the
two. The proportions are purely the result of nuclear reactions. By looking at the
proportions of the isotopes in the cold, dead ember which we are, we can discover
what the furnace was like in which the stuff of which we are made was formed.
That furnace was like the stars, and so it is very likely that our elements were
"made" in the stars and spit out in the explosions which we call novae and supernovae. Astronomy is so close to physics that we shall study many astronomical
things as we go along.
3-5 Geology
We turn now to what are called earth sciences, or geology. First, meteorology
and the weather. Of course the instruments of meteorology are physical instruments, and the development of experimental physics made these instruments
possible, as was explained before. However, the theory of meteorology has never
been satisfactorily worked out by the physicist. "Well," you say, "there is nothing
but air, and we know the equations of the motions of air." Yes we do. "So if
we know the condition of air today, why can't we figure out the condition of the
air tomorrow?" First, we do not really know what the condition is today, because
the air is swirling and twisting everywhere. It turns out to be very sensitive, and
even unstable. If you have ever seen water run smoothly over a dam, and then
turn into a large number of blobs and drops as it falls, you will understand what I
mean by unstable. You know the condition of the water before it goes over the
3-7
spillway; it is perfectly smooth; but the moment it begins to fall, where do the
drops begin? What determines how big the lumps are going to be and where they
will be? That is not known, because the water is unstable. Even a smooth moving
mass of air, in going over a mountain turns into complex whirlpools and eddies.
In many fields we find this situation of turbulent flow that we cannot analyze today.
Quickly we leave the subject of weather, and discuss geology!
The question basic to geology is, what makes the earth the way it is? The
most obvious processes are in front of your very eyes, the erosion processes of
the rivers, the winds, etc. It is easy enough to understand these, but for every bit
of erosion there is an equal amount of something else going on. Mountains are
no lower today, on the average, than they were in the past. There must be mountsim-forming processes. You will find, if you study geology, that there are
mountain-forming processes and vulcanism, which nobody understands but which
is half of geology. The phenomenon of volcanoes is really not understood. What
makes an earthquake is, ultimately, not understood. It is understood that if
something is pushing something else, it snaps and will slide—that is all right.
But what pushes, and why? The theory is that there are currents inside the earth—
circulating currents, due to the difference in temperature inside and outside—
which, in their motion, push the surface slightly. Thus if there are two opposite
circulations next to each other, the matter will collect in the region where they
meet and make belts of mountains which are in unhappy stressed conditions, and
so produce volcanoes and earthquakes.
What about the inside of the earth? A great deal is known about the speed of
earthquake waves through the earth and the density of distribution of the earth.
However, physicists have been unable to get a good theory as to how dense a
substance should be at the pressures that would be expected at the center of the
earth. In other words, we cannot figure out the properties of matter very well in
these circumstances. We do much less well with the earth than we do with the
conditions of matter in the stars. The mathematics involved seems a little too
difficult, so far, but perhaps it will not be too long before someone realizes that
it is an important problem, and really work it out. The other aspect, of course, is
that even if we did know the density, we cannot figure out the circulating currents.
Nor can we really work out the properties of rocks at high pressure. We cannot
tell how fast the rocks should "give"; that must all be worked out by experiment.
3-6 Psychology
Next, we consider the science of psychology. Incidentally, psychoanalysis is
not a science: it is at best a medical process, and perhaps even more like witchdoctoring. It has a theory as to what causes disease—lots of different "spirits,"
etc. The witch doctor has a theory that a disease like malaria is caused by a spirit
which comes into the air; it is not cured by shaking a snake over it, but quinine
does help malaria. So, if you are sick, I would advise that you go to the witch
doctor because he is the man in the tribe who knows the most about the disease;
on the other hand, his knowledge is not science. Psychoanalysis has not been
checked carefully by experiment, and there is no way to find a list of the number
of cases in which it works, the number of cases in which it does not work, etc.
The other branches of psychology, which involve things like the physiology
of sensation—what happens in the eye, and what happens in the brain—are, if
you wish, less interesting. But some small but real progress has been made in
studying them. One of the most interesting technical problems may or may not
be called psychology. The central problem of the mind, if you will, or the nervous
system, is this: when an animal learns something, it can do something different
than it could before, and its brain cell must have changed too, if it is made out of
atoms. In what way is it different ? We do not know where to look, or what to
look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what
change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all. Assuming, however, that there is
some kind of memory thing, the brain is such an enormous mass of interconnect3-8
ing wires and nerves that it probably cannot be analyzed in a straightforward
manner. There is an analog of this to computing machines and computing elements, in that they also have a lot of lines, and they have some kind of element,
analogous, perhaps, to the synapse, or connection of one nerve to another. This
is a very interesting subject which we have not the time to discuss further—the
relationship between thinking and computing machines. It must be appreciated,
of course, that this subject will tell us very little about the real complexities of
ordinary human behavior. All human beings are so different. It will be a long
time before we get there. We must start much further back. If we could even figure
out how a dog works, we would have gone pretty far. Dogs are easier to understand, but nobody yet knows how dogs work.
3-7 How did it get that way?
In order for physics to be useful to other sciences in a theoretical way, other
than in the invention of instruments, the science in question must supply to the
physicist a description of the object in a physicist's language. They can say "why
does a frog jump?," and the physicist cannot answer. If they tell him what a frog
is, that there are so many molecules, there is a nerve here, etc., that is different.
If they will tell us, more or less, what the earth or the stars are like, then we can
figure it out. In order for physical theory to be of any use, we must know where
the atoms are located. In order to understand the chemistry, we must know
exactly what atoms are present, for otherwise we cannot analyze it. That is but
one limitation, of course.
There is another kind of problem in the sister sciences which does not exist
in physics; we might call it, for lack of a better term, the historical question.
How did it get that way? If we understand all about biology, we will want to
know how all the things which are on the earth got there. There is the theory of
evolution, an important part of biology. In geology, we not only want to know
how the mountains are forming, but how the entire earth was formed in the beginning, the origin of the solar system, etc. That, of course, leads us to want to
know what kind of matter there was in the world. How did the stars evolve?
What were the initial conditions? That is the problem of astronomical history.
A great deal has been found out about the formation of stars, the formation of
elements from which we were made, and even a little about the origin of the
universe.
There is no historical question being studied in physics at the present time.
We do not have a question, "Here are the laws of physics, how did they get that
way?" We do not imagine, at the moment, that the laws of physics are somehow
changing with time, that they were different in the past than they are at present.
Of course they may be, and the moment we find they are, the historical question
of physics will be wrapped up with the rest of the history of the universe, and then
the physicist will be talking about the same problems as astronomers, geologists,
and biologists.
Finally, there is a physical problem that is common to many fields, that is
very old, and that has not been solved. It is not the problem of finding new fundamental particles, but something left over from a long time ago—over a hundred
years. Nobody in physics has really been able to analyze it mathematically
satisfactorily in spite of its importance to the sister sciences. It is the analysis of
circulating or turbulent fluids. If we watch the evolution of a star, there comes a
point where we can deduce that it is going to start convection, and thereafter we
can no longer deduce what should happen. A few million years later the star
explodes, but we cannot figure out the reason. We cannot analyze the weather.
We do not know the patterns of motions that there should be inside the earth.
The simplest form of the problem is to take a pipe that is very long and push water
through it at high speed. We ask: to push a given amount of water through that
pipe, how much pressure is needed? No one can analyze it from first principles
and the properties of water. If the water flows very slowly, or if we use a thick
goo like honey, then we can do it nicely. You will find that in your textbook.
3-9
What we really cannot do is deal with actual, wet water running through a pipe.
That is the central problem which we ought to solve some day, and we have not.
A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably
never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood.
But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire
universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates
depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its
composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars.
What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be?
There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in
wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can
discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause
of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass
of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all
back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final
pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
3-10
4
Conservation of Energy
4-1 What is energy?
In this chapter, we begin our more detailed study of the different aspects of
physics, having finished our description of things in general. To illustrate the ideas
and the kind of reasoning that might be used in theoretical physics, we shall now
examine one of the most basic laws of physics, the conservation of energy.
There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing all natural phenomena that
are known to date. There is no known exception to this law—it is exact so far as
we know. The law is called the conservation of energy. It states that there is a
certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in the manifold
changes which nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a
mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity which does not
change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number and when
we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again,
it is the same. (Something like the bishop on a red square, and after a number of
moves—details unknown—it is still on some red square. It is a law of this nature.)
Since it is an abstract idea, we shall illustrate the meaning of it by an analogy.
Imagine a child, perhaps "Dennis the Menace," who has blocks which are
absolutely indestructible, and cannot be divided into pieces. Each is the same as
the other. Let us suppose that he has 28 blocks. His mother puts him with his
28 blocks into a room at the beginning of the day. At the end of the day, being
curious, she counts the blocks very carefully, and discovers a phenomenal law—
no matter what he does with the blocks, there are always 28 remaining! This
continues for a number of days, until one day there are only 27 blocks, but a little
investigating shows that there is one under the rug—she must look everywhere
to be sure that the number of blocks has not changed. One day, however, the
number appears to change—there are only 26 blocks. Careful investigation indicates that the window was open, and upon looking outside, the other two blocks
are found. Another day, careful count indicates that there are 30 blocks! This
causes considerable consternation, until it is realized that Bruce came to visit,
bringing his blocks with him, and he left a few at Dennis' house. After she has
disposed of the extra blocks, she closes the window, does not let Bruce in, and then
everything is going along all right, until one time she counts and finds only 25
blocks. However, there is a box in the room, a toy box, and the mother goes to
open the toy box, but the boy says "No, do not open my toy box," and screams.
Mother is not allowed to open the toy box. Being extremely curious, and somewhat
ingenious, she invents a scheme! She knows that a block weighs three ounces,
so she weighs the box at a time when she sees 28 blocks, and it weighs 16 ounces.
The next time she wishes to check, she weighs the box again, subtracts sixteen
ounces and divides by three. She discovers the following:
There then appear to be some new deviations, but careful study indicates that the
dirty water in the bathtub is changing its level. The child is throwing blocks into
the water, and she cannot see them because it is so dirty, but she can find out how
many blocks are in the water by adding another term to her formula. Since the
original height of the water was 6 inches and each block raises the water a quarter
4-1
4-1 What is energy?
4-2 Gravitational potential energy
4-3 Kinetic energy
4-4 Other forms of energy
of an inch, this new formula would be:
In the gradual increase in the complexity of her world, she finds a whole series of
terms representing ways of calculating how many blocks are in places where she
is not allowed to look. As a result, she finds a complex formula, a quantity which
has to be computed, which always stays the same in her situation.
What is the analogy of this to the conservation of energy? The most remarkable aspect that must be abstracted from this picture is that there are no blocks.
Take away the first terms in (4.1) and (4.2) and we find ourselves calculating more
or less abstract things. The analogy has the following points. First, when we are
calculating the energy, sometimes some of it leaves the system and goes away,
or sometimes some comes in. In order to verify the conservation of energy, we
must be careful that we have not put any in or taken any out. Second, the energy
has a large number of different forms, and there is a formula for each one. These
are: gravitational energy, kinetic energy, heat energy, elastic energy, electrical
energy, chemical energy, radiant energy, nuclear energy, mass energy. If we total
up the formulas for each of these contributions, it will not change except for energy
going in and out.
It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what
energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite
amount. It is not that way. However, there are formulas for calculating some
numerical quantity, and when we add it all together it gives "28"'—always the
same number. It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us the mechanism or
the reasons for the various formulas.
4-2 Gravitational potential energy
Conservation of energy can be understood only if we have the formula for
all of its forms. I wish to discuss the formula for gravitational energy near the
surface of the Earth, and I wish to derive this formula in a way which has nothing
to do with history but is simply a line of reasoning invented for this particular
lecture to give you an illustration of the remarkable fact that a great deal about
nature can be extracted from a few facts and close reasoning. It is an illustration
of the kind of work theoretical physicists become involved in. It is patterned
after a most excellent argument by Mr. Carnot on the efficiency of steam engines.*
Consider weight-lifting machines—machines which have the property that
they lift one weight by lowering another. Let us also make a hypothesis: that
there is no such thing as perpetual motion with these weight-lifting machines.
(In fact, that there is no perpetual motion at all is a general statement of the law
of conservation of energy.) We must be careful to define perpetual motion.
First, let us do it for weight-lifting machines. If, when we have lifted and lowered
a lot of weights and restored the machine to the original condition, we find that
the net result is to have lifted a weight, then we have a perpetual motion machine
because we can use that lifted weight to run something else. That is, provided the
machine which lifted the weight is brought back to its exact original condition,
and furthermore that it is completely self-contained—that it has not received the
energy to lift that weight from some external source—like Bruce's blocks.
A very simple weight-lifting machine is shown in Fig. 4-1. This machine lifts
weights three units "strong." We place three units on one balance pan, and one
unit on the other. However, in order to get it actually to work, we must lift a
little weight off the left pan. On the other hand, we could lift a one-unit weight
* Our point here is not so much the result, (4.3), which in fact you may already know,
as the possibility of arriving at it by theoretical reasoning.
4-2
by lowering the three-unit weight, if we cheat a little by lifting a little weight off
the other pan. Of course, we realize that with any actual lifting machine, we must
add a little extra to get it to run. This we disregard, temporarily. Ideal machines,
although they do not exist, do not require anything extra. A machine that we
actually use can be, in a sense, almost reversible: that is, if it will lift the weight of
three by lowering a weight of one, then it will also lift nearly the weight of one the
same amount by lowering the weight of three.
We imagine that there are two classes of machines, those that are not reversible, which includes all real machines, and those that are reversible, which of
course are actually not attainable no matter how careful we may be in our design
of bearings, levers, etc. We suppose, however, that there is such a thing—a
reversible machine—which lowers one unit of weight (a pound or any other unit)
by one unit of distance, and at the same time lifts a three-unit weight. Call this
reversible machine, Machine A. Suppose this particular reversible machine lifts
the three-unit weight a distance X. Then suppose we have another machine, Machine B, which is not necessarily reversible, which also lowers a unit weight a
unit distance, but which lifts three units a distance Y. We can now prove that Y
is not higher than X; that is, it is impossible to build a machine that will lift a
weight any higher than it will be lifted by a reversible machine. Let us see why.
Let us suppose that Y were higher than X. We take a one-unit weight and lower
it one unit height with Machine B, and that lifts the three-unit weight up a distance
V. Then we could lower the weight from Y to X, obtaining free power, and use
the reversible Machine A, running backwards, to lower the three-unit weight a
distance X and lift the one-unit weight by one unit height. This will put the
one-unit weight back where it was before, and leave both machines ready to be
used again! We would therefore have perpetual motion if Y were higher than X,
which we assumed was impossible. With those assumptions, we thus deduce that
Y is not higher than X, so that of all machines that can be designed, the reversible
machine is the best.
We can also see that all reversible machines must lift to exactly the same height.
Suppose that B were really reversible also. The argument that Y is not higher than
X is, of course, just as good as it was before, but we can also make our argument
the other way around, using the machines in the opposite order, and prove that
X is not higher than Y. This, then, is a very remarkable observation because it
permits us to analyze the height to which different machines are going to lift
something without looking at the interior mechanism. We know at once that if
somebody makes an enormously elaborate series of levers that lift three units a
certain distance by lowering one unit by one unit distance, and we compare it
with a simple lever which does the same thing and is fundamentally reversible,
his machine will lift it no higher, but perhaps less high. If his machine is reversible, we also know exactly how high it will lift. To summarize: every reversible
machine, no matter how it operates, which drops one pound one foot and lifts
a three-pound weight always lifts it the same distance, X. This is clearly a universal
law of great utility. The next question is, of course, what is XI
Suppose we have a reversible machine which is going to lift this distance X,
three for one. We set up three balls in a rack which does not move, as shown in
Fig. 4-2. One ball is held on a stage at a distance one foot above the ground. The
machine can lift three balls, lowering one by a distance 1. Now, we have arranged
that the platform which holds three balls has a floor and two shelves, exactly spaced
at distance X, and further, that the rack which holds the balls is spaced at distance
X, (a). First we roll the balls horizontally from the rack to the shelves, (b), and
we suppose that this takes no energy because we do not change the height. The
reversible machine then operates: it lowers the single ball to the floor, and it lifts
the rack a distance X, (c). Now we have ingeniously arranged the rack so that
these balls are again even with the platforms. Thus we unload the balls onto the
rack, (d); having unloaded the balls, we can restore the machine to its original
condition. Now we have three balls on the upper three shelves and one at the
bottom. But the strange thing is that, in a certain way of speaking, we have not
lifted two of them at all because, after all, there were balls on shelves 2 and/3
4-3
before. The resulting effect has been to lift one ball a distance 3X. Now, if 3X
exceeds one foot, then we can lower the ball to return the machine to the initial
condition, (f), and we can run the apparatus again. Therefore 3 X cannot exceed
one foot, for if 3 X exceeds one foot we can make perpetual motion. Likewise,
we can prove that one foot cannot exceed 3X, by making the whole machine run
the opposite way, since it is a reversible machine. Therefore 3X is neither greater
nor less than a foot, and we discover then, by argument alone, the law that
X = ^ foot. The generalization is clear: one pound falls a certain distance in
operating a reversible machine; then the machine can lift p pounds this distance
divided by p. Another way of putting the result is that three pounds times the
height lifted, which in our problem was X, is equal to one pound times the distance
lowered, which is one foot in this case. If we take all the weights and multiply
them by the heights at which they are now, above the floor, let the machine operate,
and then multiply all the weights by all the heights again, there will be no change.
(We have to generalize the example where we moved only one weight to the case
where when we lower one we lift several different ones—but that is easy.)
We call the sum of the weights times the heights gravitational potential
energy—the energy which an object has because of its relationship in space, relative to the earth. The formula for gravitational energy, then, so long as we are
not too far from the earth (the force weakens as we go higher) is
It is a very beautiful line of reasoning. The only problem is that perhaps it is not
true. (After all, nature does not have to go along with our reasoning.) ,For example,
perhaps perpetual motion is, in fact, possible. Some of the assumptions may be
wrong, or we may have made a mistake in reasoning, so it is always necessary to
check. /; turns out experimentally, in fact, to be true.
The general name of energy which has to do with location relative to something else is called potential energy. In this particular case, of course, we call it
gravitational potential energy. If it is a question of electrical forces against which
we are working, instead of gravitational forces, if we are "lifting" charges away
from other charges with a lot of levers, then the energy content is called electrical
potential energy. The general principle is that the change in the energy is the force
times the distance that the force is pushed, and that this is a change in energy in
general:
We will return to many of these other kinds of energy as we continue the course.
The principle of the conservation of energy is very useful for deducing what
will happen in a number of circumstances. In high school we learned a lot of laws
about pulleys and levers used in different ways. We can now see that these "laws"
are all the same thing, and that we did not have to memorize 75 rules to figure it out.
A simple example is a smooth inclined plane which is, happily, a three-four-five
triangle (Fig. 4-3). We hang a one-pound weight on the inclined plan.e with a
pulley, and on the other side of the pulley, a weight W. We want to know how
heavy W must be to balance the one pound on the plane. How can we figure that
out? If we say it is just balanced, it is reversible and so can move up and down,
and we can consider the following situation. In the initial circumstance, (a),
the one pound weight is at the bottom and weight W is at the top. When W has
slipped down in a reversible way, we have a one-pound weight at the top and the
weight W the slant distance, (b), or five feet, from the plane in which it was before.
We lifted the one-pound weight only three feet and we lowered W pounds by
five feet. Therefore W = f of a pound. Note that we deduced this from the
conservation of energy, and not from force components. Cleverness, however, is
relative. It can be deduced in a way which is even more brilliant, discovered by
4-4
Stevinus and inscribed on his tombstone. Figure 4-4 explains that it has to be
^ of a pound, because the chain does not go around. It is evident that the lower
part of the chain is balanced by itself, so that the pull of the five weights on one
side must balance the pull of three weights on the other, or whatever the ratio of
the legs. You see, by looking at this diagram, that W must be ^ of a pound.
(If you get an epitaph like that on your gravestone, you are doing fine.)
Let us now illustrate the energy principle with a more complicated problem,
the screw jack shown in Fig. 4-5. A handle 20 inches long is used to turn the screw,
which has 10 threads to the inch. We would like to know how much force would
be needed at the handle to lift one ton (2000 pounds). If we want to lift the ton
one inch, say, then we must turn the handle around ten times. When it goes around
once it goes approximately 126 inches. The handle must thus travel 1260 inches,
and if we used various pulleys, etc., we would be lifting our one ton with an unknown smaller weight W applied to the end of the handle. So we find out that W
is about 1.6 pounds. This is a result of the conservation of energy.
Take now the somewhat more complicated example shown in Fig. 4-6. A rod
or bar, 8 feet long, is supported at one end. In the middle of the bar is a weight
of 60 pounds, and at a distance of two feet from the support there is a weight of
100 pounds. How hard do we have to lift the end of the bar in order to keep
it balanced, disregarding the weight of the bar? Suppose we put a pulley at one
end and hang a weight on the pulley. How big would the weight W have to be
in order for it to balance? We imagine that the weight falls any arbitrary distance—to make it easy for ourselves suppose it goes down 4 inches—how high
would-the two load weights rise? The center rises 2 inches, and the point a quarter
of the way from the fixed end lifts 1 inch. Therefore, the principle that the sum of
the heights times the weights does not change tells us that the weight W times
4 inches down, plus 60 pounds times 2 inches up, plus 100 pounds times 1 inch
has to add up to nothing:
Thus we must have a 55-pound weight to balance the bar. In this way we can work
out the laws of "balance"—the statics of complicated bridge arrangements, and so
on. This approach is called the principle of virtual work, because in order to apply
this argument we had to imagine that the structure moves a little—even though
it is not really moving or even movable. We use the very small imagined motion
to apply the principle of conservation of energy.
4-3 Kinetic energy
To illustrate another type of energy we consider a pendulum (Fig. 4-7).
If we pull the mass aside and release it, it swings back and forth. In its motion,
it loses height in going from either end to the center. Where does the potential
energy go? Gravitational energy disappears when it is down at the bottom;
nevertheless, it will climb up again. The gravitational energy must have gone into
another form. Evidently it is by virtue of its motion that it is able to climb up again,
so we have the conversion of gravitational energy into some other form when it
reaches the bottom.
We must get a formula for the energy of motion. Now, recalling our arguments
about reversible machines, we can easily see that in the motion at the bottom
must be a quantity of energy which permits it to rise a certain height, and which
has nothing to do with the machinery by which it comes up or the path by which
it comes up. So we have an equivalence formula something like the one we wrote
for the child's blocks. We have another form to represent the energy. It is easy to
say what it is. The kinetic energy at the bottom equals the weight times the height
that it could go, corresponding to its velocity: K.E. = WH. What we need is
the formula which tells us the height by some rule that has to do with the motion
of objects. If we start something out with a certain velocity, say straight up, it
will reach a certain height; we do not know what it is yet, but it depends on the
velocity—there is a formula for that. Then to find the formula for kinetic energy
4-5
for an object moving with velocity V, we must calculate the height that it could
reach, and multiply by the weight. We shall soon find that we can write it this way:
Of course, the fact that motion has energy has nothing to do with the fact that
we are in a gravitational field. It makes no difference where the motion came from.
This is a general formula for various velocities. Both (4.3) and (4.6) are approximate formulas, the first because it is incorrect when the heights are great, i.e.,
when the heights are so high that gravity is weakening; the second, because of the
relativistic correction at high speeds. However, when we do finally get the exact
formula for the energy, then the law of conservation of energy is correct.
4-4 Other forms of energy
We can continue in this way to illustrate the existence of energy in other forms.
First, consider elastic energy. If we pull down on a spring, we must do some work,
for when we have it down, we can lift weights with it. Therefore in its stretched
condition it has a possibility of doing some work. If we were to evaluate the sums
of weights times heights, it would not check out—we must add something else
to account for the fact that the spring is under tension. Elastic energy is the
formula for a spring when it is stretched. How much energy is it? If we let go,
the elastic energy, as the spring passes through the equilibrium point, is converted
to kinetic energy and it goes back and forth between compressing or stretching
the spring and kinetic energy of motion. (There is also some gravitational energy
going in and out, but we can do this experiment "sideways" if we like.) It keeps
going until the losses—Aha! We have cheated all the way through by putting
on little weights to move things or saying that the machines are reversible, or that
they go on forever, but we can see that things do stop, eventually. Where is the
energy when the spring has finished moving up and down? This brings in another
form of energy: heat energy.
Inside a spring or a lever there are crystals which are made up of lots of atoms,
and with great care and delicacy in the arrangement of the parts one can try to
adjust things so that as something rolls on something else, none of the atoms do
any jiggling at all. But one must be very careful. Ordinarily when things roll,
there is bumping and jiggling because of the irregularities of the material, and the
atoms start to wiggle inside. So we lose track of that energy; we find the atoms are
wiggling inside in a random and confused manner after the motion slows down.
There is still kinetic energy, all right, but it is not associated with visible motion.
What a dream! How do we know there is still kinetic energy? It turns out that
with thermometers you can find out that, in fact, the spring or the lever is warmer,
and that there is really an increase of kinetic energy by a definite amount. We call
this form of energy heat energy, but we know that it is not really a new form, it
is just kinetic energy—internal motion. (One of the difficulties with all these
experiments with matter that we do on a large scale is that we cannot really
demonstrate the conservation of energy and we cannot really make our reversible
machines, because every time we move a large clump of stuff, the atoms do not
remain absolutely undisturbed, and so a certain amount of random motion goes
into the atomic system. We cannot see it, but we can measure it with thermometers, etc.)
There are many other forms of energy, and of course we cannot describe them
in any more detail just now. There is electrical energy, which has to do with pushing and pulling by electric charges. There is radiant energy, the energy of light,
which we know is a form of electrical energy because light can be represented as
wigglings in the electromagnetic field. There is chemical energy, the energy which
is released in chemical reactions. Actually, elastic energy is, to a certain extent,
like chemical energy, because chemical energy is the energy of the attraction of
the atoms, one for the other, and so is elastic energy. Our modern understanding
is the following: chemical energy has two parts, kinetic energy of the electrons
inside the atoms, so part of it is kinetic, and electrical energy of interaction of the
4-6
electrons and the protons—the rest of it, therefore, is electrical. Next we come to
nuclear energy, the energy which is involved with the arrangement of particles
inside the nucleus, and we have formulas for that, but we do not have the fundamental laws. We know that it is not electrical, not gravitational, and not purely
chemical, but we do not know what it is. It seems to be an additional form of
energy. Finally, associated with the relativity theory, there is a modification of
the laws of kinetic energy, or whatever you wish to call it, so that kinetic energy
is combined with another thing called mass energy. An object has energy from its
sheer existence. If I have a positron and an electron, standing still doing nothing
—never mind gravity, never mind anything—and they come together and disappear, radiant energy will be liberated, in a definite amount, and the amount
can be calculated. All we need know is the mass of the object. It does not depend
on what it is—we make two things disappear, and we get a certain amount of
energy. The formula was first found by Einstein; it is E = mc2.
It is obvious from our discussion that the law of conservation of energy is
enormously useful in making analyses, as we have illustrated in a few examples
without knowing all the formulas. If we had all the formulas for all kinds of
energy, we could analyze how many processes should work without having to go
into the details. Therefore conservation laws are very interesting. The question
naturally arises as to what other conservation laws there are in physics. There
are two other conservation laws which are analogous to the conservation of
energy. One is called the conservation of linear momentum. The other is called
the conservation of angular momentum. We will find out more about these later.
In the last analysis, we do not-understand the conservation laws deeply. We do
not understand the conservation of energy. We do not understand energy as a
certain number of little blobs. You may have heard that photons come out in
blobs and that the energy of a photon is Planck's constant times the frequency.
That is true, but since the frequency of light can be anything, there is no law that
says that energy has to be a certain definite amount. Unlike Dennis' blocks, there
can be any amount of energy, at least as presently understood. So we do not understand this energy as counting something at the moment, but just as a mathematical
quantity, which is an abstract and rather peculiar circumstance. In quantum
mechanics it turns out that the conservation of energy is very closely related to
another important property of the world, things do not depend on the absolute
time. We can set up an experiment at a given moment and try it out, and then do
the same experiment at a later moment, and it will behave in exactly the same
way. Whether this is strictly true or not, we do not know. If we assume that it
is true, and add the principles of quantum mechanics, then we can deduce Jhe
principle of the conservation of energy. It is a rather subtle and interesting thing,
and it is not easy to explain. The other conservation laws are also linked together.
The conservation of momentum is associated in quantum mechanics with the
proposition that it makes no difference where you do the experiment, the results
will always be the same. As independence in space has to do with the conservation of momentum, independence of time has to do with the conservation of
energy, and finally, if we turn our apparatus, this too makes no difference, and so
the invariance of the world to angular orientation is related to the conservation
of angular momentum. Besides these, there are three other conservation laws,
that are exact so far as we can tell today, which are much simpler to understand
because they are in the nature of counting blocks.
The first of the three is the conservation of charge, and that merely means
that you count how many positive, minus how many negative electrical charges
you have, and the number is never changed. You may get rid of a positive with
a negative, but you do not create any net excess of positives over negatives. Two
other laws are analogous to this one—one is called the conservation of baryons.
There are a number of strange particles, a neutron and a proton are examples,
which are called baryons. In any reaction whatever in nature, if we count how
many baryons are coming into a process, the number of baryons* which come out
* Counting antibaryons as —1 baryon.
4-7
will be exactly the same. There is another law, the conservation of leptons. We
can say that the group of particles called leptons are: electron, mu meson, and
neutrino. There is an antielectron which is a positron, that is, a —1 lepton.
Counting the total number of leptons in a reaction reveals that the number in and
out never changes, at least so far as we know at present.
These are the six conservation laws, three of them subtle, involving space and
time, and three of them simple, in the sense of counting something.
With regard to the conservation of energy, we should note that available
energy is another matter—there is a lot of jiggling around in the atoms of the
water of the sea, because the sea has a certain temperature, but it is impossible
to get them herded into a definite motion without taking energy from somewhere
else. That is, although we know for a fact that energy is conserved, the energy
available for human utility is not conserved so easily. The laws which govern
how much energy is available are called the laws of thermodynamics and involve
a concept called entropy for irreversible thermodynamic processes.
Finally, we remark on the question of where we can get our supplies of energy
today. Our supplies of energy are from the sun, rain, coal, uranium, and hydrogen.
The sun makes the rain, and the coal also, so that all these are from the sun.
Although energy is conserved, nature does not seem to be interested in it; she
liberates a lot of energy from the sun, but only one part in two billion falls on the
earth. Nature has conservation of energy, but does not really care; she spends
a lot of it in all directions. We have already obtained energy from uranium;
we can also get energy from hydrogen, but at present only in an explosive and
dangerous condition. If it can be controlled in thermonuclear reactions, it turns
out that the energy that can be obtained from 10 quarts of water per second is equal
to all of the electrical power generated in the United States. With 150 gallons of
running water a minute, you have enough fuel to supply all the energy which is
used in the United States today! Therefore it is up to the physicist to figure out
how to liberate us from the need for having energy. It can be done.
4-8
5
Time and Distance
5-1 Motion
In this chapter we shall consider some aspects of the concepts of time and
distance. It has been emphasized earlier that physics, as do all the sciences, depends on observation. One might also say that the development of the physical
sciences to their present form has depended to a large extent on the emphasis
which has been placed on the making of quantitative observations. Only with
quantitative observations can one arrive at quantitative relationships, which are
the heart of physics.
Many people would like to place the beginnings of physics with the work
done 350 years ago by Galileo, and to call him the first physicist. Until that time,
the study of motion had been a philosophical one based on arguments that could
be thought up in one's head. Most of the arguments had been presented by
Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, and were taken as "proven." Galileo
was skeptical, and did an experiment on motion which was essentially this: He
allowed a ball to roll down an inclined trough and observed the motion. He did
not, however, just look; he measured how far the ball went in how long a time.
The way to measure a distance was well known long before Galileo, but there
were no accurate ways of measuring time, particularly short times. Although he
later devised more satisfactory clocks (though not like the ones we know), Galileo's
first experiments on motion were done by using his pulse to count off equal intervals of time. Let us do the same.
We may count off beats of a pulse as the ball rolls down the track: "one .. .
two . . . three .. . four .. . five . . . six ... seven . . . eight..." We ask a friend to
make a small mark at the location of the ball at each count; we can then measure
the distance the ball travelled from the point of release in one, or two, or three,
etc., equal intervals of time. Galileo expressed the result of his observations in
this way: if the location of the ball is marked at 1, 2, 3, 4 , . . . units of time from
the instant of Its release, those marks are distant from the starting point in proportion to the numbers 1, 4, 9, 16, . . . Today we would say the distance is proportional to the square of the time:
The study of motion, which is basic to all of physics, treats with the questions:
where? and when?
5-2 Time
Let us consider first what we mean by time. What is time? It would be nice
if we could find a good definition of time. Webster defines "a time" as "a period,"
and the latter as "a time," which doesn't seem to be very useful. Perhaps we should
say: "Time is what happens when nothing else happens." Which also doesn't
get us very far. Maybe it is just as well if we face the fact that time is one of the
things we probably cannot define (in the dictionary sense), and just say that it
is what we already know it to be: it is how long we wait!
What really matters anyway is not how we define time, but how we measure
it. One way of measuring time is to utilize something which happens over and
over again in a regular fashion—something which is periodic. For example, a
day. A day seems to happen over and over again. But when you begin to think
5-1
5-1 Motion
5-2 Time
5-3 Short times
5-4 Long times
5-5 Units and standards of time
5-6 Large distances
5-7 Short distances
Fig. 5-1. A ball rolls down an
dined track.
about it, you might well ask: "Are days periodic; are they regular? Are all days
the same length?" One certainly has the impression that days in summer are longer
than days in winter. Of course, some of the days in winter seem to get awfully
long if one is very bored. You have certainly heard someone say, "My, but this
has been a long day!"
It does seem, however, that days are about the same length on the average.
Is there any way we can test whether the days are the same length—either from
one day to the next, or at least on the average? One way is to make a comparison
with some other periodic phenomenon. Let us see how such a comparison might
be made with an hour glass. With an hour glass, we can "create" a periodic
occurrence if we have someone standing by it day and night to turn it over whenever the last grain of sand runs out.
We could then count the turnings of the glass from each morning to the next.
We would find, this time, that the number of "hours" (i.e., turnings of the glass)
was not the same each "day." We should distrust the sun, or the glass, or both.
After some thought, it might occur to us to count the "hours" from noon to noon.
(Noon is here defined not as 12:00 o'clock, but that instant when the sun is at its
highest point.) We would find, this time, that the number of "hours" each day
is the same.
We now have some confidence that both the "hour" and the "day" have a
regular periodicity, i.e., mark off successive equal intervals of time, although we
have not proved that either one is "really" periodic. Someone might question
whether there might not be some omnipotent being who would slow down the
flow of sand every night and speed it up during the day. Our experiment does not,
of course, give us an answer to this sort of question. All we can say is that we find
that a regularity of one kind fits together with a regularity of another kind. We
can just say that we base our definition of time on the repetition of some apparently
periodic event.
5-3 Short times
We should now notice that in the process of checking on the reproducibility
of the day, we have received an important by-product. We have found a way of
measuring, more accurately, fractions of a day. We have found a way of counting
time in smaller pieces. Can we carry the process further, and learn to measure
even smaller intervals of time?
Galileo decided that a given pendulum always swings back and forth in equal
intervals of time so long as the size of the swing is kept small. A test comparing
the number of swings of a pendulum in one "hour" shows that such is indeed the
case. We can in this way mark fractions of an hour. If we use a mechanical device
to count the swings—and to keep them going—we have the pendulum clock of
our grandfathers.
Let us agree that if our pendulum oscillates 3600 times in one hour (and if
there are 24 such hours in a day), we shall call each period of the pendulum one
"second." We have then divided our original unit of time into approximately
105 parts. We can apply the same principles to divide the second into smaller and
smaller intervals. It is, you will realize, not practical to make mechanical pendulums which go arbitrarily fast, but we can now make electrical pendulums,
called oscillators, which can provide a periodic occurrence with a very short
period of swing. In these electronic oscillators it is an electrical current which
swings to and fro, in a manner analogous to the swinging of the bob of the pendulum.
We can make a series of such electronic oscillators, each with a period 10
times shorter than the previous one. We may "calibrate" each oscillator against
the next slower one by counting the number of swings it makes for one swing of
the slower oscillator. When the period of oscillation of our clock is shorter than
a fraction of a second, we cannot count the oscillations without the help of some
device which extends our powers of observation. One such device is the electronbeam oscilloscope, which acts as a sort of microscope for short times. This device
plots on a fluorescent screen a graph of electrical current (or voltage) versus time.
5-2
By connecting the oscilloscope to two of our oscillators in sequence, so that it
plots a graph first of the current in one of our oscillators and then of the current
in the other, we get two graphs like those shown in Fig. 5-2. We can readily
determine the number of periods of the faster oscillator in one period of the
slower oscillator.
With modern electronic techniques, oscillators have been built with periods
as short as about 10~12 second, and they have been calibrated (by comparison
methods such as we have described) in terms of our standard unit of time, the
second. With the invention and perfection of the "laser," or light amplifier, in
the past few years, it has become possible to make oscillators with even shorter
periods than 10~12 second, but it has not yet been possible to calibrate them by
the methods which have been described, although it will no doubt soon be possible.
Times shorter than 10~12 second have been measured, but by a different technique. In effect, a different definition of "time" has been used. One way has been
to observe the distance between two happenings on a moving object. If, for
example, the headlights of a moving automobile are turned on and then off,
we can figure out how long the lights were on if we know where they were turned
on and off and how fast the car was moving. The time is the distance over which
the lights were on divided by the speed.
Within the past few years, just such a technique was used to measure the
lifetime of the π°-meson. By observing in a microscope the minute tracks left in
a photographic emulsion in which π°-mesons had been created one saw that a
π°-meson (known to be travelling at a certain speed nearly that of light) went a
distance of about 10-7 meter, on the average, before disintegrating. It lived for
only about 10~16 sec. It should be emphasized that we have here used a somewhat different definition of "time" than before. So long as there are no inconsistencies in our understanding, however, we feel fairly confident that our definitions
are sufficiently equivalent.
By extending our techniques—and if necessary our definitions—still further
we can infer the time duration of still faster physical events. We can speak of the
period of a nuclear vibration. We can speak of the lifetime of the newly discovered
strange resonances (particles) mentioned in Chapter 2. Their complete life occupies
a time span of only 10-24 second, approximately the time it would take light
(which moves at the fastest known speed) to cross the nucleus of hydrogen (the
smallest known object).
What about still smaller times? Does "time" exist on a still smaller scale?
Does it make any sense to speak of smaller times if we cannot measure—or
perhaps even think sensibly about—something which happens in a shorter time?
Perhaps not. These are some of the open questions which you will be asking and
perhaps answering in the next twenty or thirty years.
Fig. 5-2. Two views of an oscilloscope
screen. In (a) the oscilloscope is connected
to one oscillator, in (b) it is connected to an
oscillator with a period one-tenth as long.
5-4 Long times
Let us now consider times longer than one day. Measurement of longer times
is easy; we just count the days—so long as there is someone around to do thecounting. First we find that there is another natural periodicity: the year, about
365 days. We have also discovered that nature has sometimes provided a counter
for the years, in the form of tree rings or river-bottom sediments. In some cases
we can use these natural time markers to determine the time which has passed
since some early event.
When we cannot count the years for the measurement of long times, we must
look for other ways to measure. One of the most successful is the use of radioactive material as a "clock." In this case we do not have a periodic occurrence,
as for the day or the pendulum, but a new kind of "regularity." We find that the
radioactivity of a particular sample of material decreases by the same fraction
for successive equal increases in its age. If we plot a graph of the radioactivity
observed as a function of time (say in days), we obtain a curve like that shown in
Fig. 5-3. We observe that if the radioactivity decreases to one-half in T days
(called the "half-life"), then it decreases to one-quarter in another T days, and so
5-3
Fig. 5-3. The decrease with time of
radioactivity. The activity decreases by
one-half in each "half-life," T.
on. In an arbitrary time interval t there are t/T "half-lives," and the fraction left
after this time t is ^')tlT.
If we knew that a piece of material, say a piece of wood, had contained an
amount A of radioactive material when it was formed, and we found out by a direct
measurement that it now contains the amount B, we could compute the age of
the object, t, by solving the equation
There are, fortunately, cases in which we can know the amount of radioactivity
that was in an object when it was formed. We know, for example, that the carbon
dioxide in the air contains a certain small fraction of the radioactive carbon
isotope C 14 (replenished continuously by the action of cosmic rays). If we measure
the total carbon content of an object, we know that a certain fraction of that amount
was originally the radioactive C 14 ; we know, therefore, the starting amount A
to use in the formula above. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5000 years. By careful
measurements we can measure the amount left after 20 half-lives or so and can
therefore "date" organic objects which grew as long as 100,000 years ago.
We would like to know, and we think we do know, the life of still older things.
Much of our knowledge is based on the measurements of other radioactive isotopes which have different half-lives. If we make measurements with an isotope
with a longer half-life, then we are able to measure longer times. Uranium, for
example, has an isotope whose half-life is about 109 years, so that if some material
was formed with uranium in it 109 years ago, only half the uranium would remain
today. When the uranium disintegrates, it changes into lead. Consider a piece
of rock which was formed a long time ago in some chemical process. Lead, being
of a chemical nature different from uranium, would appear in one part of the rock
and uranium would appear in another part of the rock. The uranium and lead
5-4
would be separate. If we look at that piece of rock today, where there should only
be uranium we will how find a certain fraction of uranium and a certain fraction
of lead. By comparing these fractions, we can tell what percent of the uranium
disappeared and changed into lead. By this method, the age of certain rocks has
been determined to be several billion years. An extension of this method, not
using particular rocks but looking at the uranium and lead in the oceans and using
averages over the earth, has been used to determine (within the past few years)
that the age of the earth itself is approximately 5.5 billion years.
It is encouraging that the age of the earth is found to be the same as the age
of the meteorites which land on the earth, as determined by the uranium method.
It appears that the earth was formed out of rocks floating in space, and that the
meteorites are, quite likely, some of that material left over. At some time more than
five billion years ago, the universe started. It is now believed that at least our part
of the universe had its beginning about ten or twelve billion years ago. We do
not know what happened before then. In fact, we may well ask again: Does the
question make any sense? Does an earlier time have any meaning?
5-5 Units and standards of time
We have implied that it is convenient if we start with some standard unit of
time, say a day or a second, and refer all other times to some multiple or fraction
of this unit. What shall we take as our basic standard of time? Shall we take the
human pulse? If we compare pulses, we find that they seem to vary a lot. On
comparing two clocks, one finds they do not vary so much. You might then say,
well, let us take a clock. But whose clock? There is a story of a Swiss boy who
wanted all of the clocks in his town to ring noon at the same time. So he went
around trying to convince everyone of the value of this. Everyone thought it was
a marvelous idea so long as all of the other clocks rang noon when his did! It is
rather difficult to decide whose clock we should take as a standard. Fortunately,
we all share one clock—the earth. For a long time the rotational period of the
earth has been taken as the basic standard of time. As measurements have been
made more and more precise, however, it has been found that the rotation of the
earth is not exactly periodic, when measured in terms of the best clocks. These
"best" clocks are those which we have reason to believe are accurate because they
agree with each other. We now believe that, for various reasons, some days are
longer than others, some days are shorter, and on the average the period of the
earth becomes a little longer as the centuries pass.
Until very recently we had found nothing much better than the earth's
period, so all clocks have been related to the length of the day, and the second
has been defined as 1/86400 of an average day. Recently we have been gaining
experience with some natural oscillators which we now believe would provide a
more constant time reference than the earth, and which are also based on a natural
phenomenon available to everyone. These are the so-called "atomic clocks."
Their basic internal period is that of an atomic vibration which is very insensitive
to the temperature or any other external effects. These clocks keep time to an
accuracy of one part in 109 or better. Within the past two years an improved
atomic clock which operates on the vibration of the hydrogen atom has been designed and built by Professor Norman Ramsey at Harvard University. He believes
that this clock might be 100 times more accurate still. Measurements now in
progress will show whether this is true or not.
We may expect that since it has been possible to build clocks much more
accurate than astronomical time, there will soon be an agreement among scientists
to define the unit of time in terms of one of the atomic clock standards.
5-6 Large distances
Let us now turn to the question of distance. How far, or how big, are things?
Everybody knows that the way you measure distance is to start with a stick and
count. Or start with a thumb and count. You begin with a unit and count. How
5-5
Fig. 5-4. The height of a Sputnik is
determined by triangulation
Fig. 5-5. The distance of nearby
stars can be measured by triangulation,
using the diameter of the earth's orbit as
a baseline.
does one measure smaller things? How does one subdivide distance? In the same
way that we subdivided time: we take a smaller unit and count the number of
such units it takes to make up the longer unit. So we can measure smaller and
smaller lengths.
But we do not always mean by distance what one gets by counting off with a
meter stick. It would be difficult to measure the horizontal distance between two
mountain tops using only a meter stick. We have found by experience that distance can be measured in another fashion: by triangulation. Although this means
that we are really using a different definition of distance, when they can both be
used they agree with each other. Space is more or less what Euclid thought it
was, so the two types of definitions of distance agree. Since they do agree on the
earth it gives us some confidence in using triangulation for still larger distances.
For example, we were able to use triangulation to measure the height of the first
Sputnik. We found that it was roughly 5 X 105 meters high. By more careful
measurements the distance to the moon can be measured in the same way. Two
telescopes at different places on the earth can give us the two angles we need.
It has been found in this way that the moon is 4 X 108 meters away.
We cannot do the same with the sun, or at least no one has been able to yet.
The accuracy with which one can focus on a given point on the sun and with which
one can measure angles is not good enough to permit us to measure the distance
to the sun. Then how can we measure the distance to the sun? We must invent
an extension of the idea of triangulation. We measure the relative distances of
all the planets by astronomical observations of where the planets appear to be,
and we get a picture of the solar system with the proper relative distances of everything, but with no absolute distance. One absolute measurement is then required,
which has been obtained in a number of ways. One of the ways, which was believed
until recently to be the most accurate, was to measure the distance from the earth
to Eros, one of the small planetoids which passes near the earth every now and then.
By triangulation on this little object, one could get the one required scale measurement. Knowing the relative distances of the rest, we can then tell the distance, for
example, from the earth to the sun, or from the earth to Pluto.
Within the past year there has been a big improvement in our knowledge of
the scale of the solar system. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory the distance from
the earth to Venus was measured quite accurately by a direct radar observation.
This, of course, is a still different type of inferred distance. We say we know
the speed at which light travels (and therefore, at which radar waves travel),
and we assume that it is the same speed everywhere between the earth and Venus.
We send the radio wave out, and count the time until the reflected wave comes
back. From the time we infer a distance, assuming we know the speed. We have
really another definition of a measurement of distance.
How do we measure the distance to a star, which is much farther away?
Fortunately, we can go back to our triangulation method, because the earth moving
around the sun gives us a large baseline for measurements of objects outside the
solar system. If we focus a telescope on a star in summer and in winter, we might
hope to determine these two angles accurately enough to be able to measure the
distance to a star.
What if the stars are too far away for us to use triangulation? Astronomers
are always inventing new ways of measuring distance. They find, for example,
that they can estimate the size and brightness of a star by its color. The color
and brightness of many nearby stars—whose distances are known by triangulation—have been measured, and it is found that there is a smooth relationship
between the color and the intrinsic brightness of stars (in most cases). If one now
measures the color of a distant star, one may use the color-brightness relationship
to determine the intrinsic brightness of the star. By measuring how bright the star
appears to us at the earth (or perhaps we should say how dim it appears), we can
compute how far away it is. (For a given intrinsic brightness, the apparent brightness decreases with the square of the distance.) A nice confirmation of the correctness of this method of measuring stellar distances is given by the results obtained
for groups of stars known as globular clusters. A photograph of such a group is
5-6
Fig. 5-6. A cluster of stars near the center of our galaxy. Their distance from the
earth is 30,000 light-years, or about 3 X 1 0 2 0 meters.
shown in Fig. 5-6. Just from looking at the photograph one is convinced that these
stars are all together. The same result is obtained from distance measurements
by the color-brightness method.
A study of many globular clusters gives another important bit of information. It is found that there is a high concentration of such clusters in a certain
part of the sky and that most of them are about the same distance from us. Coupling this information with other evidence, we conclude that this concentration of
clusters marks the center of our galaxy. We then know the distance to the center
of the galaxy—about 1020 meters.
Knowing the size of our own galaxy, we have a key to the measurement of
still larger distances—the distances to other galaxies. Figure 5-7 is a photograph
of a galaxy, which has much the same shape as our own. Probably it is the same
size, too. (Other evidence supports the idea that galaxies are all about the same
size.) If it is the same size as ours, we can tell its distance. We measure the angle
it subtends in the sky; we know its diameter, and we compute its distance—
triangulation again!
Fig. 5-7. A spiral galaxy like our own. Presuming that its diameter is similar to
that of our own galaxy, we may compute its distance from its apparent size. It is 30
million light-years (3 X 1 0 2 3 meters) from the earth.
5-7
Fig. 5-8. The most distant object, 3C295 in BOOTES (indicated by the arrow),
measured by the 200-inch telescope to date (1960).
Photographs of exceedingly distant galaxies have recently been obtained with
the giant Palomar telescope. One is shown in Fig. 5-8. It is now believed that
some of these galaxies are about halfway to the limit of the universe—1026 meters
away—the largest distance we can contemplate!
5-7 Short distances
Now let's think about smaller distances. Subdividing the meter is easy. Without much difficulty we can mark off one thousand equal spaces which add up to
one meter. With somewhat more difficulty, but in a similar way (using a good
microscope), we can mark off a thousand equal subdivisions of the millimeter to
make a scale of microns (millionths of a meter). It is difficult to continue to smaller
scales, because we cannot "see" objects smaller than the wavelength of visible
light (about 5 X 10~7 meter).
We need not stop, however, at what we can see. With an electron microscope,
we can continue the process by making photographs on a still smaller scale, say
down to 10~8 meter (Fig. 5-9). By indirect measurements—by a kind oftriangulation on a microscopic scale— we can continue to measure to smaller and smaller
scales. First, from an observation of the way light of short wavelength (x-radiation)
is reflected from a pattern of marks of known separation, we determine the wave-
Fig. 5-9. Electron micrograph of some virus molecules. The "large" sphere is for
calibration and is known to have a diameter of 2 X 10~ 7 meter (2000 A).
5-8
DISTANCES
LIGHT-YEARS
METERS
length of the light vibrations. Then, from the pattern of the scattering of the same
light from a crystal, we can determine the relative location of the atoms in the
crystal, obtaining results which agree with the atomic spacings also determined
by chemical means. We find in this way that atoms have a diameter of about
10-10 meter.
There is a large "gap" in physical sizes between the typical atomic dimension
of about lO"10 meter and the nuclear dimensions 10~15 meter, 10~5 times smaller.
For nuclear sizes, a different way of measuring size becomes convenient. We measure the apparent area, σ, called the effective cross section. If we wish the radius,
we can obtain it from σ == rr2, since nuclei are nearly spherical.
Measurement of a nuclear cross section can be made by passing a beam of
high-energy particles through a thin slab of material and observing the number
of particles which do not get through. These high-energy particles will plow right
through the thin cloud of electrons and will be stopped or deflected only if they
hit the concentrated weight of a nucleus. Suppose we have a piece of material
1 centimeter thick. There will be about 108 atomic layers. But the nuclei are so
small that there is little chance that any nucleus will lie behind another. We might
imagine that a highly magnified view of the situation—looking along the particle
beam—would look like Fig. 5-10.
The chance that a very small particle will hit a nucleus on the trip through
is just the total area covered by the profiles of the nuclei divided by the total
area in the picture. Suppose that we know that in an area A of our slab of material
there are N atoms (each with one nucleus, of course). Then the total area "covered"
by the nuclei is N σ / A . Now let the number of particles of our beam which arrive
at the slab be n\ and the number which come out the other side be n^. The fraction which do not get through is (n1 — n^/n^, which should just equal the
5-9
Fig. 5-10. Imagined view through a
block of carbon 1 cm thick if only the
nuclei were observed.
fraction of the area covered. We can obtain the radius of the nucleus from the
equation*
From such an experiment we find that the radii of the nuclei are from about 1 to 6
times 10~15 meter. The length unit lO"15 meter is called fhe fermi, in honor of
Enrico Fermi (1901-1958).
What do we find if we go to smaller distances? Can we measure smaller
distances ? Such questions are not yet answerable. It has been suggested that the
still unsolved mystery of nuclear forces may be unravelled only by some modification of our idea of space, or measurement, at such small distances.
It might be thought that it would be a good idea to use some natural length
as our unit of length—say the radius of the earth or some fraction of it. The
meter was originally intended to be such a unit and was defined to be (π/2) X 10~7
times the earth's radius. It is neither convenient nor very accurate to determine
the unit of length in this way. For a long time it has been agreed internationally
that the meter would be defined as the distance between two scratches on a bar
kept in a special laboratory in France. More recently, it has been realized that
this definition is neither as precise as would be useful, nor as permanent or universal
as one would like. It is currently being considered that a new definition be adopted,
an agreed-upon (arbitrary) number of wavelengths of a chosen spectral line.
Measurements of distance and of time give results which depend on the observer. Two observers moving with respect to each other will not measure the same
distances and times when measuring what appear to be the same things. Distances
and time intervals have different magnitudes, depending on the coordinate system
(or "frame of reference") used for making the measurements. We shall study this
subject in more detail in a later chapter.
Perfectly precise measurements of distances or times are not permitted by the
laws of nature. We have mentioned earlier that the errors in a measurement of
the position of an object must be at least as large as
where h is a small quantity called "Planck's constant" and ∆p is the error in
our knowledge of the momentum (mass times velocity) of the object whose position we are measuring. It was also mentioned that the uncertainty in position
measurements is related to the wave nature of particles.
The relativity of space and time implies that time measurements have also a
minimum error, given in fact by
where AE is the error in our knowledge of the energy of the process whose time
period we are measuring. If we wish to know more precisely when something
happened we must know less about what happened, because our knowledge of
the energy involved will be less. The time uncertainty is also related to the wave
nature of matter.
* This equation is right only if the area covered by the nuclei is a small fraction of the
total, i.e., if (MI — ni)ln\ is much less than 1. Otherwise we must make a correction
for the fact that some nuclei will be partly obscured by the nuclei in front of them.
5-10